An Empirical Study of $μ$P Learning Rate Transfer

Fuente: arXiv
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1. Verfasser: Lingle, Lucas
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Lingle, Lucas
author_facet Lingle, Lucas
contents Deep learning models have become a cornerstone of modern AI research, yet their initializations and learning rates may at times be set in an opaque or ad-hoc fashion due to the high cost of hyperparameter sweeps. The $μ$-Parameterization ($μ$P) offers a possible solution to this challenge, yielding scaling rules for model initialization and learning rates while reportedly enabling zero-shot hyperparameter transfer from small to large models. Despite its evident promise, the $μ$P method is not yet widely adopted, perhaps due to higher implementation complexity, many variations, or complex theoretical background. This work considers $μ$P empirically, focusing on the popular transformer architecture, and aims to answer a simple question: does $μ$-Transfer yield near-optimal learning rates in practice? Studying over a dozen ablations with up to 1.2B parameters and 33B tokens and a large-scale experiment with up to 10B parameters and 190B tokens, we observe a positive answer for most settings, and discuss improvements otherwise.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_05728
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Empirical Study of $μ$P Learning Rate Transfer
Lingle, Lucas
Machine Learning
Deep learning models have become a cornerstone of modern AI research, yet their initializations and learning rates may at times be set in an opaque or ad-hoc fashion due to the high cost of hyperparameter sweeps. The $μ$-Parameterization ($μ$P) offers a possible solution to this challenge, yielding scaling rules for model initialization and learning rates while reportedly enabling zero-shot hyperparameter transfer from small to large models. Despite its evident promise, the $μ$P method is not yet widely adopted, perhaps due to higher implementation complexity, many variations, or complex theoretical background. This work considers $μ$P empirically, focusing on the popular transformer architecture, and aims to answer a simple question: does $μ$-Transfer yield near-optimal learning rates in practice? Studying over a dozen ablations with up to 1.2B parameters and 33B tokens and a large-scale experiment with up to 10B parameters and 190B tokens, we observe a positive answer for most settings, and discuss improvements otherwise.
title An Empirical Study of $μ$P Learning Rate Transfer
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05728