Institutional Books - Enriched Text: A customizable multilingual open-source pipeline for denoising, deduplicating, and annotating OCR text at scale

Released in 2025, Institutional Books: Harvard Library (IB-HL) is a collection of 983,004 volumes (242B o200k_base tokens), originally digitized through Harvard Library's participation in the Google Books Library project. As researchers and developers have begun to use IB-HL, a tension has emerged between standard large-scale preprocessing practices and the goals of careful information stewardship. Many existing pipelines optimize for web text: as a result, they tend to aggressively filter, deduplicate, restrict by language, and sometimes discard meaningful metadata. Meanwhile, researchers seeking to use IB-HL duplicate effort while performing similar processing and analysis. We describe an approach that we call Enriched Text. Instead of producing a single 'complete' stream of tokens, we normalize the text while preserving metadata through annotations. We separate endmatter, detect per-paragraph language, identify clusters of duplicate paragraphs, and compute per-paragraph bits-per-byte scores. We provide this information through HTML-like annotations layered on top of the text. By parsing these annotations, users can tailor the output to their own needs instead of accepting a global editorial decision on content. The pipeline applies to all $\approx$250 languages in the collection. This report describes this project's goals, implementation, and design rationale. The release includes IB-HL-ET (an enriched-text version of IB-HL containing 217B o200k_base tokens across 983,003 volumes, organized into 1.39B annotated subtopic paragraphs) and the pipeline that produced it. These serve to make the collection easier for machines to parse and for humans to study.

Cross-Attention Calibrated Deduplication for Retrieval-Augmented Generation System

Common chunking strategies in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems often create redundant chunks. These redundant chunks make the vector database bigger and slow down retrieval. A common fix is cosine-similarity thresholding. This method reduces each chunk to a single vector, then compares vectors using a similarity score. But a single vector can lose the fine-grained, token-level detail needed to tell a true duplicate apart from a chunk that just shares the same topic. We propose Cross-Attention Calibrated Deduplication (CACD). CACD checks each new chunk against an in-memory pool of chunks already kept, using a cross-encoder instead of a single pooled vector. This keeps token-level detail all the way to the final comparison. CACD combines three parts: the cross-encoder comparison itself, a New Information Score (NIS) that measures how much of a chunk is not explained by a candidate already kept, and a majority vote across several candidates rather than a single best match. NIS is calculated from the attention entropy of the cross-encoder. We tested CACD against five existing filtering methods, nine chunking strategies, and 18 configurations, all on the full SQuAD 1.1 validation set. In our experiments, CACD removes 9.75% of chunks on average. This drop rate is close to other semantic-level methods, and much higher than exact-match filters, which barely remove anything. In these experiments, CACD also processes each configuration in 51.0 seconds on average, about 27% faster than the strongest baseline, NERExact (69.6s), and about 7x faster than cosine-similarity filtering (356.7s). These results come from a single dataset, so we present them as an early comparison, not a general claim. Code for the baseline evaluation and for CACD is available at https://github.com/lehuyphuong/rag_bench and https://github.com/lehuyphuong/cacd_dedup.

An Ontology-Guided, Deduplication-Aware Extraction Layer for Knowledge Graph Construction from Heterogeneous Documents

Large language models extract entities and relationships from unstructured documents fluently but inconsistently: type vocabularies fracture across documents, the same person surfaces under several name variants, relationships duplicate, and distinct individuals who share a name risk silent conflation. This paper presents the design, implementation, and empirical refinement of a production extraction layer that converts a live document stream into a validated knowledge graph aligned to a formal ontology. The system consumes document metadata from Kafka, routes PDF, spreadsheet, Office, and image content through handlers built for each format, and extracts entities and relationships in two passes using a locally hosted Qwen3.5-9B model tuned on the ontology. Its distinguishing component is ontology-guided extraction: the relevant slice of a curated ontology is retrieved live from a graph database by embedding similarity and injected into the extraction prompt, reducing catalog overhead by about 94 percent relative to static domain slices. Extracted results then pass through a refinement pipeline of five stages: deterministic cleaning, merging across chunks, a second pass for relationships, six deduplication algorithms that require no model inference, and an embedding resolution subsystem whose conflict guard no similarity score can override. Evaluation on intelligence corpora improved search recall from roughly 70 to 95 percent with no false merges, and corrected seven classes of silent quality defect, ranging from a bug that truncated source text by a single character to the systematic duplication of entities that carried title prefixes.

CuraWeb: Joint Optimization of Quality, Redundancy, and Diversity for Web-Scale Pretraining Data

Open-web corpora curated via highly selective filters, such as FineWeb-Edu and DCLM, constitute the core of LLM pretraining data and have significantly advanced LLM performance. However, these pipelines typically rely on singular optimization objectives, which inevitably narrows distributional diversity and marginalizes long-tail knowledge, thereby restricting data coverage and underutilizing the vast potential of the open web. To address this limitation, we propose a novel curation paradigm that shifts from linear pruning to the joint optimization of quality, redundancy, and diversity. This framework synergizes dual-track cleaning (rule-based and model-driven) with hybrid deduplication (n-gram and semantic), while employing a multi-objective sampler to balance informational quality with distributional breadth. Applying this framework to Common Crawl, we construct CuraWeb, a 2T-token English corpus. Unlike existing resources, CuraWeb establishes an industrial-grade standard for data curation by recovering a more holistic data distribution with enhanced diversity and minimal redundancy, achieving broader coverage of long-tail knowledge across diverse domains. Experimental evaluations at the 3B scale demonstrate that CuraWeb significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding an average performance gain of 1.8\% across a wide range of benchmarks, particularly in knowledge-intensive and reasoning tasks.

IHUBERT: Vector-Based Semantic Deduplication and Domain-Balanced Pretraining for Persian Resources

Persian pretrained language models (PLMs) are still limited by the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality pretraining corpora and by insufficient evaluation beyond standard classification and NER tasks. We present IHUBERT, a monolingual Persian PLM trained from scratch with the RoBERTa-base encoder (125M parameters) on a 45 GB curated subset of the Sepahr-Danesh collection (about 7-8B tokens). To improve corpus quality and reduce redundancy, we employ a multi-stage preprocessing pipeline that includes normalization, exact and near-duplicate removal, anonymization, and vector-database-based semantic deduplication for distribution balancing control across domains and registers. We additionally train a 139k-vocabulary BPE tokenizer on the full pretraining corpus to better capture Persian morphology and orthographic variation. IHUBERT is evaluated on seven Persian NLU benchmarks covering NER, sentiment analysis, topic classification, NLI, extractive question answering, and relation extraction, using task-standard metrics (entity-level F1, Macro-F1, EM/F1). IHUBERT achieves its strongest gains on extractive QA, ranking first on both PQuAD (F1 88.3542) and ParsiNLU-RC (F1 49.0987), and attains the best result on FarsTail (Macro-F1 0.8350). On NER and topic classification, it remains competitive (e.g., 0.8308 F1 on ParsTwiNER; 0.7953 Macro-F1 on DigiMag), while relation extraction remains the main remaining gap (0.6684 Macro-F1 on PERLEX). A controlled tokenizer ablation on the IHUBERT pretraining corpus shows that BPE yields slightly lower subword fragmentation than WordPiece at matched vocabulary size, supporting our tokenization design. Overall, IHUBERT advances Persian language modeling through semantically curated large-scale pretraining and broad evaluation across both classification and comprehension-oriented tasks.

AudioDER: A Deduplication-Enhanced Reasoning Dataset for Post-Training Large Audio-Language Models

Recent advances in pretrained large audio-language models (LALMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across speech, sound, and music. To adapt these models to downstream tasks without the cost of pretraining from scratch, post-training has become a widely adopted paradigm. However, the effectiveness of post-training depends critically on the quality of the training corpus. We observe that existing post-training corpora, often constructed by aggregating public audio datasets, suffer from substantial acoustic redundancy, as many of these datasets are sourced from overlapping media platforms. Such redundancy leads to repeated exposure to similar acoustic patterns, causing diminishing returns in performance despite increased data volume. address this issue, we propose a three-stage data construction pipeline that performs acoustic redundancy filtering, converts retained samples into a unified multiple-choice question-answering format with chain-of-thought generation, and finally applies quality verification and filtering. Using this pipeline, we construct AudioRE, a post-training dataset of approximately 286k instances spanning sound, speech, and music. Supervised fine-tuning on AudioRE consistently improves the performance of Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct across diverse audio understanding and reasoning benchmarks, outperforming models trained on the unfiltered raw corpus with substantially more instances. These results validate the effectiveness of our redundancy-aware data construction pipeline and the resulting AudioRE dataset, and further highlight the importance of minimizing acoustic redundancy in audio-language post-training. To facilitate future research, we will release both the AudioRE and the fine-tuned Qwen2-AudioRE checkpoint.

MUFFLe: Efficient Model Update Compression via Generalized Deduplication for Federated Learning

Federated learning is well suited to edge environments but is often limited by the uplink cost of transmitting model updates. This Work-in-Progress paper presents MUFFLe, a communication-efficient update compression scheme that integrates generalized deduplication (GD) into the FedAvg pipeline. MUFFLe deduplicates repeated patterns across the update vector, yielding a fixed-rate, variable-count compression scheme. Preliminary experiments on IID MNIST with 20 clients show that MUFFLe reaches the target accuracy of $92.93\%$ with 38~MB cumulative uplink communication, compared with 75~MB for 8-bit quantization, 86~MB for Top-$k$ sparsification, and 310~MB for uncompressed FedAvg. These results demonstrate the feasibility of applying GD to communication-efficient federated learning.