option to not concatenate during pretraining

src/axolotl/core/trainer_builder.py

@@ -1877,6 +1877,8 @@ class HFCausalTrainerBuilder(TrainerBuilderBase):
         self, training_args: AxolotlTrainingArguments, is_eval=False, **kwargs
     ):
         if training_args.pretraining:
+            if self.cfg.pretraining_sample_concatenation is False:
+                return DataCollatorForSeq2Seq(self.tokenizer, **kwargs)
             return None
 
         if self.cfg.model_config_type == "mamba":

src/axolotl/utils/config/models/input/v0_4_1/__init__.py

@@ -698,6 +698,12 @@ class AxolotlInputConfig(
     pad_to_sequence_len: Optional[bool] = None
     curriculum_sampling: Optional[bool] = None
     multipack_real_batches: Optional[bool] = None
+    pretraining_sample_concatenation: Optional[bool] = Field(
+        default=None,
+        json_schema_extra={
+            "description": "whether to soft pack/concatenate samples during pretraining",
+        },
+    )
 
     batch_flattening: Optional[Union[Literal["auto"], bool]] = None
 

src/axolotl/utils/data/pretraining.py

@@ -18,7 +18,10 @@ LOG = logging.getLogger("axolotl")
 
 
 def encode_pretraining(
-    tokenizer: PreTrainedTokenizerBase, max_tokens: int, examples: Dict[str, List]
+    tokenizer: PreTrainedTokenizerBase,
+    max_tokens: int,
+    examples: Dict[str, List],
+    concatenate: bool = True,
 ) -> Dict[str, List]:
     res = tokenizer(
         examples["text"],
@@ -30,6 +33,13 @@ def encode_pretraining(
     input_ids = [torch.tensor(seq) for seq in res["input_ids"]]
     targets = [torch.tensor(seq) for seq in res["input_ids"]]
     attention_mask = [torch.tensor(seq) for seq in res["attention_mask"]]
+    if not concatenate:
+        return {
+            "input_ids": [seq.tolist() for seq in input_ids],
+            "labels": [seq.tolist() for seq in targets],
+            "attention_mask": [seq.tolist() for seq in attention_mask],
+        }
+
     new_input_ids = []
     new_labels = []
     new_attention_mask = []
@@ -195,6 +205,10 @@ def wrap_pretraining_dataset(
         )
         # set this to 1 so downstream data_loader doesn't try to increase the batch again
         cfg.micro_batch_size = 1
+    elif cfg.pretraining_sample_concatenation is False:
+        encode = functools.partial(
+            encode_pretraining, tokenizer, max_tokens, concatenate=False
+        )
     else:
         encode = functools.partial(encode_pretraining, tokenizer, max_tokens)