Scalable Data Synthesis through Human-like Cognitive Imitation and Data Recombination

Large language models (LLMs) rely on massive amounts of training data, however, the quantity of empirically observed data is limited. To alleviate this issue, lots of LLMs leverage synthetic data to enhance the quantity of training data. Despite significant advancements in LLMs, the efficiency and scalability characteristics of data synthesis during pre-training phases remain insufficiently explored. In this work, we propose a novel data synthesis framework, Cognitive Combination Synthesis (CCS), designed to achieve highly efficient and scalable data synthesis. Specifically, our methodology mimics human cognitive behaviors by re-combining and interconnecting heterogeneous data from diverse sources thereby enhancing advanced reasoning capabilities in LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that: (1) effective data organization is essential, and our mapping-based combination learning approach significantly improves data utilization efficiency; (2) by enhancing data diversity , accuracy , and complexity , our synthetic data scales beyond 100B tokens, revealing CCS’s strong scalability. Our findings highlight the impact of data organization methods on LLM learning efficiency and the significant potential of scalable synthetic data to enhance model reasoning capabilities.