Abstract
Open-web corpora curated via highly selective filters, such as FineWeb-Edu and DCLM, constitute the core of LLM pretraining data and have significantly advanced LLM performance. However, these pipelines typically rely on singular optimization objectives, which inevitably narrows distributional diversity and marginalizes long-tail knowledge, thereby restricting data coverage and underutilizing the vast potential of the open web.
To address this limitation, we propose a novel curation paradigm that shifts from linear pruning to the joint optimization of quality, redundancy, and diversity. This framework synergizes dual-track cleaning (rule-based and model-driven) with hybrid deduplication (n-gram and semantic), while employing a multi-objective sampler to balance informational quality with distributional breadth. Applying this framework to Common Crawl, we construct CuraWeb, a 2T-token English corpus.
Unlike existing resources, CuraWeb establishes an industrial-grade standard for data curation by recovering a more holistic data distribution with enhanced diversity and minimal redundancy, achieving broader coverage of long-tail knowledge across diverse domains. Experimental evaluations at the 3B scale demonstrate that CuraWeb significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding an average performance gain of 1.8\% across a wide range of benchmarks, particularly in knowledge-intensive and reasoning tasks.
Blogger's Review: The joint optimization approach of CuraWeb presents a new perspective on data curation, significantly enhancing the effectiveness of pretraining datasets by considering quality, diversity, and redundancy. This innovative strategy provides a new direction for future LLM research, particularly in covering long-tail knowledge, which is of great practical significance.