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  - education
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  - fineweb-edu
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  - knowledge-boundary
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- - common-core
 
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  ---
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  # LittleCurriculum
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- **LittleCurriculum** is a **developmentally restricted** ≈88-billion-token English pretraining corpus:
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- a **precision-first** subset of [FineWeb-Edu](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu)
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- filtered to the U.S. **K–5** developmental level. A multi-stage pipeline enforces constraints on
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- **knowledge, syntactic complexity, and reasoning** (with Common Core State Standards as the grade-level
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- reference), removing material characteristic of the **Beyond-K–5** curriculum—advanced concepts such as
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- algebra or higher-grade science—while retaining text a K–5 learner can process.
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-
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- It is the corpus behind the **LittleLearner** models — language models trained from scratch under a
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- *pedagogically controlled knowledge boundary*, released alongside matched unfiltered controls. See the
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- [LittleLearner model collection](https://huggingface.co/littlelearner).
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-
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- > **A note on scope.** The pipeline constrains the **developmental level** of a text—the knowledge,
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- > linguistic complexity, and reasoning it demands—not its subject matter. Advanced **Beyond-K–5 concepts**
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- > (calculus, quantum physics, and the like) are filtered to near-zero, but subject matter itself is not
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- > curated: everyday content on any topic a curious child might follow—aviation, current events, crime in
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- > the news—can appear when written at a K–5 level. The design is deliberately *precision-first*, trading
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- > recall for a sharp, interpretable boundary (validated on CommonCoreText and WeeBit; see paper §3.1).
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- > See **Scope of filtering** and **Limitations** below.
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-
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- ## Dataset at a glance
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-
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- | | |
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- |---|---|
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- | Tokens | ≈88B (measured ≈86–88B; tokenizer-dependent) |
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- | Documents | ~242M |
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- | Shards | 2,546 Parquet files (`shard_00000.parquet` … `shard_02545.parquet`) |
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- | Compression | ZSTD |
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- | Schema | `id` (string), `text` (string) |
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- | Language | English |
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- | Source | FineWeb-Edu (CommonCrawl-derived) |
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- | License | ODC-By 1.0 |
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-
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- *Token counts were measured with the LittleLearner tokenizer (vocab 32,768; ≈4.43 chars/token). The
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- paper reports the corpus as "88B tokens"; the LittleLearner models were each trained on **80B tokens**
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- (≈0.9 epoch of this corpus) — the corpus size and the training budget are distinct quantities.*
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-
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- ## Provenance
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-
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- ```
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- CommonCrawl → FineWeb-Edu → [5-stage K–5 filter] → LittleCurriculum
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- ```
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-
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- ## Filtering pipeline
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-
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- The corpus is produced by applying five sequential filters to FineWeb-Edu documents. The reusable,
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- self-contained implementation is released as supplementary material with the paper.
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- 1. **Age-of-Acquisition + Zipf.** Drop a document if its out-of-vocabulary fraction exceeds 5%, or if
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- the 95th-percentile word Age-of-Acquisition exceeds 12 years. Unknown words are imputed an AoA from
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- Zipf word frequency.
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- 2. **FastText grade classifier.** Keep a document only if a 4-class (K5 / K8 / K12 / out-of-scope)
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- fastText classifier assigns it the **K5** label.
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- 3. **ModernBERT grade classifier.** Keep a document only if a fine-tuned ModernBERT sequence classifier
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- assigns it the **K5** class (independent second classifier; documents must pass *both*).
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- 4. **Symbolic filter.** Drop documents matching any of ~28 advanced-mathematics / notation patterns
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- (exponents, radicals, integrals/sums, `\frac`, function notation, chemical formulas, etc.).
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- 5. **Word-list filter.** Drop documents containing any word from a corpus-derived blocklist of terms
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- strongly associated with beyond-K–5 material (log-odds `delta_k5 ≤ -4`).
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- ## Intended use
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- Research on **controlled knowledge exposure**: studying whether a capability was *learned* from the
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- training distribution or merely *elicited* by post-training/scaling/prompting, when the training
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- distribution's coverage is explicitly specified. Suitable for pretraining language models with an
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- interpretable knowledge boundary, continual-learning and boundary-probing studies, and machine-vs-child
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- learning comparisons.
 
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- ## Scope of filtering: developmental level, not topic
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- Consistent with the paper, the pipeline enforces constraints on **knowledge, syntactic complexity, and
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- reasoning**—the *developmental level* a text demands—rather than curating subject matter. Two things
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- follow: (i) advanced **Beyond-K–5 concepts** (e.g. calculus, quantum physics) are removed to near-zero;
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- and (ii) subject matter is otherwise not restricted, so everyday content on any topic a curious child
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- might follow—aviation, current events, crime in the news—can appear when written at a K–5 level. The
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- filter is *precision-first*: tuned for near-zero Beyond-K–5 retention at the cost of discarding much
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- in-scope material, yielding a sharp, interpretable boundary rather than an exhaustive sample of K–5 text.
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- ## Limitations
 
 
 
 
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- - **Developmental-level filter, not topical curation.** See **Scope of filtering** above — the pipeline
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- removes Beyond-K–5 *concepts*, not general subject matter, which can span any domain at a K–5 level.
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- - **Not zero-exposure.** The filter removes advanced academic *content and skills*, not every token. A
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- measured spot-check found beyond-curriculum vocabulary present only at low, grade-appropriate
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- frequency (e.g. "adrenaline" 0.075%, "hormone" 0.177%, "epinephrine" 0.006%, "ballistic missile"
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- 0.001% of documents), overwhelmingly in everyday registers (news/history, food labels, first-aid,
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- narrative) rather than advanced technical instruction. The capability-boundary claim concerns
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- *skills*, not *lexical exposure*.
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- - **Evaluation scope.** In the accompanying paper, the "elicitation, not acquisition" finding is
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- evaluated primarily on **mathematical reasoning** (MathCAMPS, accuracy by grade). General-knowledge
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- boundary behavior is characterized qualitatively via targeted probes rather than a systematic
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- benchmark.
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- - **Inherited biases.** As a filtered subset of FineWeb-Edu (web text), the corpus inherits the
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- coverage, quality, and biases of that source and of CommonCrawl.
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- - **Classifier imperfection.** The grade classifiers and heuristics are imperfect; both false drops
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- (in-scope text removed) and false keeps (borderline text retained) occur.
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-
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- ## License & attribution
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-
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- Released under the **Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) v1.0**, inherited from FineWeb-Edu.
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- Use requires attribution to this dataset and to the upstream source. Underlying text originates from
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- CommonCrawl; please also observe the CommonCrawl terms of use.
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  ## Citation
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-
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  ```bibtex
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- @article{littlelearner2026,
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- title = {LittleLearner: Language Models Under Pedagogically-Controlled Knowledge Exposure},
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- author = {Fanfei Li and Jana Zeller and Manuel Prada-Corral and Thadd{\"a}us Wiedemer
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- and Prasanna Mayilvahanan and Ryan Cotterell and Wieland Brendel},
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- journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2608.13545},
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- year = {2026},
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- url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545}
 
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  }
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  ```
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-
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- Please also cite **FineWeb-Edu** (Penedo et al., 2024) as the upstream source.
 
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  - education
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  - fineweb-edu
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  - knowledge-boundary
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+ - common-core-standards
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+
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  ---
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  # LittleCurriculum
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+ **LittleCurriculum** is an ~88B-token English pretraining corpus derived from [FineWeb-Edu](https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb-edu-score-2). It is filtered to align with U.S. Common Core standards for grades **K–5**, removing documents containing academic concepts and skills characteristic of later grades.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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+ It is the training corpus for the **LittleLearner** models, designed to study language models under a controlled knowledge boundary. See the [LittleLearner paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545) for methodology, validation, and experiments.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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+ ## Dataset
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+ * **Documents:** ~242M
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+ * **Tokens:** ~88B
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+ * **Language:** English
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+ * **Source:** FineWeb-Edu
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+ * **Format:** Parquet (`id`, `text`)
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+ * **License:** ODC-By 1.0
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+ ## Dataset Construction
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+ LittleCurriculum is produced from FineWeb-Edu using five sequential filters:
 
 
 
 
 
 
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+ 1. Age-of-Acquisition and word-frequency filtering
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+ 2. fastText grade-level classification
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+ 3. ModernBERT grade-level classification
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+ 4. Advanced mathematical/symbolic notation filtering
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+ 5. Beyond-K–5 vocabulary filtering
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+ The filters constrain the **developmental level** of a text—the knowledge, complexity, and reasoning it demands—not its subject matter. Advanced **Beyond-K–5 concepts** (e.g. calculus, quantum physics) are removed, but topic is deliberately not curated: everyday material on any subject a curious learner might exploreaviation, current events, crime in the news—can appear when written at a K–5 level. Likewise, words associated with advanced topics may occur in ordinary, grade-appropriate contexts. Full construction details, thresholds, validation, and limitations are described in the [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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  ## Citation
 
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  ```bibtex
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+ @misc{li2026littlelearnerlanguagemodelspedagogically,
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+ title={LittleLearner: Language Models Under Pedagogically Controlled Knowledge Exposure},
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+ author={Fanfei Li and Jana Zeller and Manuel Prada-Corral and Thaddäus Wiedemer and Prasanna Mayilvahanan and Ryan Cotterell and Wieland Brendel},
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+ year={2026},
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+ eprint={2608.13545},
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+ archivePrefix={arXiv},
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+ primaryClass={cs.CL},
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+ url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13545},
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  }
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  ```