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Data Engineering for Large Models: Architecture, Algorithms & Projects

Source: Lobsters: Newest Stories
Published: February 13, 2026 at 7:48 PM

"Data Engineering for Large Models: Architecture, Algorithms, and Project Practice"

Book Overview

  • Part 1: Infrastructure & Core Concepts (Building the Data Foundation)
  • Part 2: Text Pre-training Data Engineering (Cleaning & Denoising)
  • Part 3: Multimodal Data Engineering (Image-Text, Video & Audio)
  • Part 4: Alignment & Synthetic Data Engineering (Instructions & Quality)
  • Part 5: Application-level Data Engineering (RAG & Agent)
  • Part 6: Capstone Projects (End-to-end Code Implementations)

Detailed Outline

Part 1: Infrastructure & Core Concepts

Goal: Establish a Data-Centric AI mindset and set up a high-performance data processing environment.

Chapter 1: Data Revolution in the LLM Era

  • 1_1 Insights from Scaling Laws: Data quality > quantity — the paradigm shift from "big data" to "high-quality data."
  • 1_2 LLM Data Lifecycle: Pre-training \(\rightarrow\) SFT \(\rightarrow\) RLHF \(\rightarrow\) RAG.
  • 1_3 Challenges & Opportunities: The interplay of heterogeneous multimodality, copyright compliance, and compute costs.

Chapter 2: Data Infrastructure Selection

  • 2_1 Modern Data Stack:
  • Storage: Object storage (S3/MinIO) vs Data lakes (Iceberg/Hudi).
  • Compute: Spark (traditional powerhouse) vs Ray Data (AI-native compute framework).
  • 2_2 Data Formats & I/O Optimization:
  • Parquet vs JSONL vs WebDataset (multimodal scenarios).
  • Compression algorithms and read performance optimization.
  • 2_3 Data Version Control (DataOps): Managing PB-scale datasets with DVC and LakeFS.

Part 2: Text Pre-training Data Engineering

Goal: Process massive unstructured text to build the model's linguistic cognitive foundation.

Chapter 3: Data Acquisition

  • 3_1 Deconstructing Open-source Datasets: Deep analysis of Common Crawl, C4, RefinedWeb, and The Pile.
  • 3_2 High-performance Web Crawling: Application of Trafilatura parsing library and distributed crawler architecture design.
  • 3_3 Specialized Data Acquisition: Extraction strategies for code (GitHub), papers (ArXiv/S2ORC), and book data.

Chapter 4: Cleaning & Deduplication

  • 4_1 Heuristic Filtering Rules: Language identification (FastText), perplexity filtering, length and punctuation distribution.
  • 4_2 Large-scale Deduplication:
  • Fuzzy Deduplication: MinHash LSH algorithm principles and distributed implementation.
  • Intra-document Deduplication: Eliminating repeated paragraphs and navigation bars.
  • 4_3 Privacy Cleaning (PII Removal): Using Presidio to identify and mask emails, IPs, phone numbers, and addresses.

Chapter 5: Tokenization & Serialization

  • 5_1 Tokenizer Principles: BPE, WordPiece, Unigram and their impact on model performance.
  • 5_2 Efficient Vocabulary Construction: How to expand vocabularies for specific domains (e.g., medical, legal).
  • 5_3 Data Mixing: Dynamic sampling strategies and Curriculum Learning data arrangement.

Part 3: Multimodal Data Engineering

Goal: Process images, video, and audio to support training of GPT-4V/Sora-class models.

Chapter 6: Image-Text Pair Processing

  • 6_1 Data Paradigms: Image-text pairs (LAION-5B) vs Interleaved documents (OBELICS/MMC4).
  • 6_2 Image Acquisition & Preprocessing:
  • img2dataset high-concurrency download in practice.
  • GPU-accelerated decoding and transforms (NVIDIA DALI).
  • 6_3 Multimodal Cleaning Pipeline:
  • Aesthetic Scoring: Using CLIP-Score to filter high-aesthetic images.
  • Image-text Alignment Filtering: Removing mismatched samples.
  • Safety Detection: NSFW and watermark detection.

Chapter 7: Recaptioning

  • 7_1 Limitations of Alt-text: Why raw web descriptions are unusable.
  • 7_2 Synthetic Caption Factory:
  • Using BLIP-2 / LLaVA / CogVLM to regenerate detailed captions.
  • Prompt Strategies: Controlling caption granularity (brief vs detailed).
  • 7_3 OCR Enhancement: Extracting in-image text and fusing it into text descriptions (critical for document understanding).

Chapter 8: Video & Audio Data

  • 8_1 Video Processing Pipeline: Scene Detection and keyframe extraction strategies.
  • 8_2 Video Tokenization: Video compression and discrete representation.
  • 8_3 Audio Alignment: Large-scale ASR with Whisper and Force Alignment (timestamp alignment).

Part 4: Alignment & Synthetic Data Engineering

Goal: Make models follow instructions and break through the bottleneck of human data.

Chapter 9: Instruction Fine-tuning Data (SFT Data)

  • 9_1 Prompt Engineering for Data Production: Writing robust System Prompts.
  • 9_2 Automated Construction Methods:
  • Self-Instruct: Leveraging strong models to generate instructions.
  • Evol-Instruct: Evolutionary strategies for instruction complexity.
  • 9_3 Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Data: Constructing step-by-step reasoning samples.

Chapter 10: Synthetic Data

  • 10_1 Textbook-quality Data (Textbooks Are All You Need): Synthesizing high-quality domain knowledge.
  • 10_2 Code & Math Synthesis:
  • PoT (Program of Thought): Generating code, executing it, and verifying data correctness via execution results.
  • 10_3 Multimodal Instruction Synthesis: Using GPT-4o to construct complex image-based reasoning Q&A.

Chapter 11: Human Preference Data (RLHF/DPO)

  • 11_1 Preference Data Format: Constructing chosen vs rejected sample pairs.
  • 11_2 Annotation Platforms & Quality Control: Crowdsourcing management and IAA (Inter-Annotator Agreement) analysis.
  • 11_3 RLAIF (AI Feedback): Using LLMs to replace human preference scoring.

Part 5: Application-level Data Engineering (RAG & Agent)

Goal: Enterprise-oriented solutions for external knowledge base parsing and retrieval.

Chapter 12: RAG Data Pipeline

  • 12_1 Deep Document Parsing:
  • Complex PDF processing: table reconstruction, multi-column recognition (Unstructured, LlamaParse).
  • 12_2 Chunking Strategies: Semantic chunking, recursive chunking, and Parent-Child Indexing.
  • 12_3 Vectorization & Storage: Embedding model fine-tuning and vector database optimization.

Chapter 13: Multimodal RAG

  • 13_1 Cross-modal Retrieval: Using CLIP/SigLIP for "text-to-image" and "image-to-text" search.
  • 13_2 ColPali Architecture in Practice: Vision-language model based document retrieval (skip OCR, directly understand document images).

Part 6: Capstone Projects

Goal: Through 5 end-to-end projects, integrate all technical topics from the book with runnable code repositories.

Project 1: Building a "Mini-C4" Pre-training Set

  • Scenario: From Common Crawl raw data (WARC) to high-quality Parquet data.
  • Core Technologies: Trafilatura parsing, Spark/Ray distributed MinHash deduplication, KenLM quality filtering.
  • Output: Cleaned plain text corpus and processing pipeline.

Project 2: Domain Expert SFT (Legal/Medical)

  • Scenario: Building industry expert fine-tuning data from unstructured PDF documents.
  • Core Technologies: Self-Instruct instruction generation, CoT reasoning enhancement, data diversity balancing.
  • Output: domain_expert.jsonl instruction fine-tuning dataset.

Project 3: Building a LLaVA Multimodal Instruction Set

  • Scenario: Training a multimodal model that can understand images.
  • Core Technologies: Using GPT-4o API for multi-turn image-text dialogues, Bounding Box data alignment, multi-image interleaved format processing.
  • Output: Image-text dataset with visual instructions.

Project 4: Synthetic Math/Code Textbook

  • Scenario: Improving small model logical reasoning capabilities.
  • Core Technologies: Evol-Instruct evolutionary strategies, Python code execution sandbox verification, PoT data formatting.
  • Output: Verified high-quality synthetic reasoning dataset.

Project 5: Multimodal RAG Financial Report Assistant

  • Scenario: Retrieving and answering questions about annual reports with complex charts.
  • Core Technologies: PDF table and chart parsing, multi-route recall (hybrid retrieval), ColPali visual retrieval.
  • Output: A RAG knowledge base system supporting chart Q&A.

Appendix

  • Appendix A: Common Tools Quick Reference (Hugging Face Datasets, LangChain, Ray Data).
  • Appendix B: Data Compliance Checklist (Copyright, GDPR, robots.txt).
  • Appendix C: Compute Cost Estimation (GPU/CPU consumption reference for different data processing scales).
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