SLM-125M-extended — continued pretraining of slm-125m-base
Ace-2504/slm-125m-base continued for one epoch on ~515M additional tokens
(389M FineWeb-Edu + 131M US case law) that the base model had never seen.
Constant learning rate 1e-4, optimizer state reset, 982 steps on one A100-40GB.
This model exists to answer a research question: does continued pretraining on new
data improve a small model overall, or does it cause catastrophic forgetting?
Measured against the base model on its own held-out data, forgetting tracked each
domain's share of the new data almost exactly:
Table with columns: Domain, share of new data, loss change| Domain | share of new data | loss change |
|---|
| SEC filings | 0% | +8.1% (worst) |
| US case law | 25% | +1.0% |
| FineWeb-Edu | 75% | -1.7% (improved) |
Use Ace-2504/slm-125m-base if you want the original. Neither model is
instruction-tuned; both are base models.