Overlapping Context with Variable-Length Stride Increases Diversity when Training Large Language Model for Code

AbstractThe pretraining of code LLMs typically begins with general data and progresses to domain-specific data through sequential stages. In the latter stages, a challenging issue is that the data of a target domain can be limited in size, and conventional approach of increasing the number of epochs does not lead to a performance gain. In this paper, we propose a novel packing method, which is extracting overlapping contexts from the training data using variable-length stride. Our method can mitigate the data-scarcity issue by providing more diverse and abundant examples of next token prediction than non-overlapping contexts. While the training time of our approach is increased proportionally to the amount of augmented examples, we present space-efficient implementations to store overlapping contexts. Extensive experiments with real datasets show that our approach outperforms the conventional approach of controlling the number of epochs in terms of the pass@k rate.