@inproceedings{yin-etal-2025-improving,
    title = "Improving Continual Pre-training Through Seamless Data Packing",
    author = "Yin, Ruicheng  and
      Gao, Xuan  and
      Lv, Changze  and
      Wang, Xiaohua  and
      Zheng, Xiaoqing  and
      Huang, Xuanjing",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.777/",
    pages = "15014--15032",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Continual pre-training has demonstrated significant potential in enhancing model performance, particularly in domain-specific scenarios. The most common approach for packing data before continual pre-training involves concatenating input texts and splitting them into fixed-length sequences. While straightforward and efficient, this method often leads to excessive truncation and context discontinuity, which can hinder model performance. To address these issues, we explore the potential of data engineering to enhance continual pre-training, particularly its impact on model performance and efficiency. We propose Seamless Packing (SP), a novel data packing strategy aimed at preserving contextual information and enhancing model performance. Our approach employs a sliding window technique in the first stage that synchronizes overlapping tokens across consecutive sequences, ensuring better continuity and contextual coherence. In the second stage, we adopt a First-Fit-Decreasing algorithm to pack shorter texts into bins slightly larger than the target sequence length, thereby minimizing padding and truncation. Empirical evaluations across various model architectures and corpus domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, outperforming baselines in 99{\%} of all settings. Code is available at https://github.com/Infernus-WIND/Seamless-Packing."
}