Mix, Don't Tune: Bilingual Pre-Training Outperforms Hyperparameter Search in Data-Constrained Settings

For most languages of the world, language model pre-training operates in a data-constrained regime where models must repeat their training data many times, degrading generalization. Two remedies exist: aggressive hyperparameter tuning such as high weight decay, and mixing in data from a high-resource auxiliary language to directly aid the low-resource target. While hyperparameter tuning regularizes the model by shrinking weights to restrict network capacity, auxiliary data mixing uses a tunable mixing ratio to expand the training distribution and diversify the training signal with new…