LLM DCAI Infographic

A data-centric AI infographic
Published

October 4, 2025

<!DOCTYPE html> The MLLM Data-Centric AI Infographic
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        <h1 class="text-4xl md:text-6xl font-black brand-text tracking-tight">The Data-Centric AI Revolution</h1>
        <h2 class="text-xl md:text-2xl font-semibold accent-text mt-2">Powering the Next Generation of Multimodal LLMs</h2>
        <p class="max-w-3xl mx-auto mt-4 text-base md:text-lg">
            The performance of state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is not just about architecture—it's about the data. This infographic explores the sophisticated data pipelines, from acquisition to pre-training, that are essential for building powerful and robust AI.
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    <section class="grid grid-cols-1 md:grid-cols-3 gap-6 md:gap-8 text-center mb-12 md:mb-20">
        <div class="card items-center justify-center flex flex-col">
            <span class="text-5xl md:text-6xl font-black brand-text">15T+</span>
            <p class="mt-2 font-semibold accent-text">Tokens</p>
            <p class="text-sm">Processed for training leading models like LLaMA 3, after aggressive filtering.</p>
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        <div class="card items-center justify-center flex flex-col">
            <span class="text-5xl md:text-6xl font-black brand-text">5.8B</span>
            <p class="mt-2 font-semibold accent-text">Image-Text Pairs</p>
            <p class="text-sm">In foundational datasets like LAION-5B, forming the bedrock of vision pre-training.</p>
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        <div class="card items-center justify-center flex flex-col">
            <span class="text-5xl md:text-6xl font-black brand-text">600+</span>
            <p class="mt-2 font-semibold accent-text">Programming Languages</p>
            <p class="text-sm">Covered in code datasets like The Stack, enabling advanced code-multimodal capabilities.</p>
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            <h3 class="text-3xl md:text-4xl font-bold brand-text">The MLLM Data Pipeline: A Six-Stage Journey</h3>
            <p class="max-w-3xl mx-auto mt-2">
                Every state-of-the-art model relies on a meticulously engineered data pipeline. This process transforms raw, noisy web data into highly optimized fuel for training.
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                    <div class="pipeline-icon brand-bg">🔎</div>
                    <h4 class="font-bold mt-3 text-lg">Sourcing</h4>
                    <p class="text-sm mt-1">Acquiring web-scale text, image, and code data.</p>
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                <div class="pipeline-connector"></div>
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                    <div class="pipeline-icon accent-bg">🧹</div>
                    <h4 class="font-bold mt-3 text-lg">Cleaning</h4>
                    <p class="text-sm mt-1">Filtering NSFW/PII and removing low-quality samples.</p>
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                    <div class="pipeline-icon brand-bg">🧬</div>
                    <h4 class="font-bold mt-3 text-lg">Deduplication</h4>
                    <p class="text-sm mt-1">Applying semantic checks to ensure data uniqueness.</p>
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                <div class="pipeline-step">
                    <div class="pipeline-icon accent-bg">✨</div>
                    <h4 class="font-bold mt-3 text-lg">Enrichment</h4>
                    <p class="text-sm mt-1">Adding value via OCR, ASR, and metadata joins.</p>
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                <div class="pipeline-connector"></div>
                <div class="pipeline-step">
                    <div class="pipeline-icon brand-bg">📚</div>
                    <h4 class="font-bold mt-3 text-lg">Curriculum</h4>
                    <p class="text-sm mt-1">Scheduling data by difficulty or resolution.</p>
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                <div class="pipeline-connector"></div>
                <div class="pipeline-step">
                    <div class="pipeline-icon accent-bg">🤖</div>
                    <h4 class="font-bold mt-3 text-lg">Synthesis</h4>
                    <p class="text-sm mt-1">Generating high-quality data with RLAIF & Self-Instruct.</p>
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                <h3 class="text-2xl font-bold brand-text mb-4">Global Model Data Practices</h3>
                <p class="mb-6">Leading models exhibit unique data strategies. This comparison highlights their relative focus across key data-centric dimensions, from leveraging proprietary data sources to pioneering new curriculum learning techniques.</p>
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                <h3 class="text-2xl font-bold brand-text mb-4">Foundational Dataset Scale</h3>
                <p class="mb-6">The sheer scale of open-source datasets is staggering. These collections provide the raw material for pre-training, with billions of data points spanning text, images, and code. Quality and filtering, however, remain paramount.</p>
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                 <h3 class="text-2xl font-bold brand-text mb-4">Pre-training Objective Mix</h3>
                <p class="mb-6">Modern MLLMs are trained on a mix of objectives to learn diverse capabilities. While next-token prediction is foundational, contrastive and masked modeling tasks are crucial for building robust cross-modal understanding.</p>
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                <h3 class="text-3xl font-bold brand-text mb-4">Key Techniques Deep Dive</h3>
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                    <div class="p-4 bg-white rounded-lg shadow-sm border-l-4 border-[#003F5C]">
                        <h4 class="font-bold text-lg accent-text">Semantic Deduplication</h4>
                        <p class="text-sm">Using embeddings to find and remove conceptually similar data, even across languages, is critical to prevent benchmark leakage and improve generalization.</p>
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                    <div class="p-4 bg-white rounded-lg shadow-sm border-l-4 border-[#366E8A]">
                        <h4 class="font-bold text-lg accent-text">Resolution Curriculum</h4>
                        <p class="text-sm">Pioneered by models like InternVL, this involves training on low-resolution images first, then progressing to higher resolutions to accelerate learning and boost final performance.</p>
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                    <div class="p-4 bg-white rounded-lg shadow-sm border-l-4 border-[#6B9DB3]">
                        <h4 class="font-bold text-lg accent-text">Small Models as Filters</h4>
                        <p class="text-sm">Leveraging smaller, efficient models to filter massive datasets for quality, aesthetics, and safety at scale, a key strategy for models like LLaMA 3.</p>
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    </section>

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        <div class="text-center mb-12">
            <h3 class="text-3xl md:text-4xl font-bold brand-text">Best Practices & Future Challenges</h3>
            <p class="max-w-3xl mx-auto mt-2">The field is rapidly evolving. Adopting today's best practices is key, but preparing for tomorrow's challenges is what will drive the next breakthrough.</p>
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                <h4 class="text-2xl font-bold brand-text mb-4">Checklist for Success</h4>
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                    <li class="flex items-start"><span class="accent-text text-2xl mr-3">✅</span><span><strong>Adopt Semantic Deduplication:</strong> Go beyond simple hashing to ensure true data novelty.</span></li>
                    <li class="flex items-start"><span class="accent-text text-2xl mr-3">✅</span><span><strong>Implement Curriculum Learning:</strong> Schedule data by difficulty or resolution to train more efficiently.</span></li>
                    <li class="flex items-start"><span class="accent-text text-2xl mr-3">✅</span><span><strong>Invest in Synthetic Data:</strong> Use RLAIF and LLM Judges to create high-quality, complex instruction data.</span></li>
                    <li class="flex items-start"><span class="accent-text text-2xl mr-3">✅</span><span><strong>Prioritize Domain Data:</strong> Integrate specialized data (code, e-commerce, science) to build expert models.</span></li>
                    <li class="flex items-start"><span class="accent-text text-2xl mr-3">✅</span><span><strong>Use Quality Gates:</strong> Employ small, efficient models to filter web-scale data effectively.</span></li>
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                 <h4 class="text-2xl font-bold brand-text mb-4">The Road Ahead</h4>
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                     <li class="flex items-start"><span class="brand-text text-2xl mr-3">➡️</span><span><strong>Copyright & Governance:</strong> Developing frameworks for data traceability and responsible sourcing is becoming urgent.</span></li>
                     <li class="flex items-start"><span class="brand-text text-2xl mr-3">➡️</span><span><strong>Benchmark Leakage:</strong> A move towards dynamic, adversarial evaluation is needed to truly test model generalization.</span></li>
                     <li class="flex items-start"><span class="brand-text text-2xl mr-3">➡️</span><span><strong>Long Video & High-Res Cost:</strong> Efficient tokenization and modeling for high-dimensional data remains a major hurdle.</span></li>
                     <li class="flex items-start"><span class="brand-text text-2xl mr-3">➡️</span><span><strong>Synthetic Data Bias:</strong> Ensuring synthetic data is factual, unbiased, and culturally aware is a critical open problem.</span></li>
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    </section>

    <footer class="text-center mt-16 pb-8">
        <p class="text-sm text-gray-500">Infographic based on the "Frontier Survey of MLLM Data Practices," October 2025.</p>
    </footer>

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