Predicting Training Re-evaluation Curves Enables Effective Data Curriculums for LLMs

Abstract: Data curriculums have become central to successful LLM training, yet principles governing optimal data placement remain unclear. We introduce the training re-evaluation curve (TREC), a diagnostic that retrospectively evaluates training batches using the final model weights. The TREC characterizes how well a trained model retains training data as a function of when the data was encountered during training. Analyzing TRECs for models from 111M to 3.9B parameters, we show that placing high-quality data at low points on the TREC significantly improves performance. Importantly, while a TREC is initially observable only after training, we demonstrate it can be predicted in advance from AdamW's implicit EMA coefficients, enabling proactive curriculum design. By predicting TRECs for published training recipes, we explain prior ablations and reveal suboptimal data placements. We also align high-quality data with TREC minima in order to improve continual pre-training of a 3.9B-parameter LLM trained on 900B tokens.