Temporal Scaling Law for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xiong, Yizhe, Chen, Xiansheng, Ye, Xin, Chen, Hui, Lin, Zijia, Lian, Haoran, Su, Zhenpeng, Huang, Wei, Niu, Jianwei, Han, Jungong, Ding, Guiguang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Xiong, Yizhe
Chen, Xiansheng
Ye, Xin
Chen, Hui
Lin, Zijia
Lian, Haoran
Su, Zhenpeng
Huang, Wei
Niu, Jianwei
Han, Jungong
Ding, Guiguang
author_facet Xiong, Yizhe
Chen, Xiansheng
Ye, Xin
Chen, Hui
Lin, Zijia
Lian, Haoran
Su, Zhenpeng
Huang, Wei
Niu, Jianwei
Han, Jungong
Ding, Guiguang
contents Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in a wide range of tasks, leading to increasing attention towards the research on how scaling LLMs affects their performance. Existing works, termed Scaling Laws, have discovered that the final test loss of LLMs scales as power-laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size. However, the temporal change of the test loss of an LLM throughout its pre-training process remains unexplored, though it is valuable in many aspects, such as selecting better hyperparameters \textit{directly} on the target LLM. In this paper, we propose the novel concept of Temporal Scaling Law, studying how the test loss of an LLM evolves as the training steps scale up. In contrast to modeling the test loss as a whole in a coarse-grained manner, we break it down and dive into the fine-grained test loss of each token position, and further develop a dynamic hyperbolic-law. Afterwards, we derive the much more precise temporal scaling law by studying the temporal patterns of the parameters in the dynamic hyperbolic-law. Results on both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) validation datasets demonstrate that our temporal scaling law accurately predicts the test loss of LLMs across training steps. Our temporal scaling law has broad practical applications. First, it enables direct and efficient hyperparameter selection on the target LLM, such as data mixture proportions. Secondly, viewing the LLM pre-training dynamics from the token position granularity provides some insights to enhance the understanding of LLM pre-training.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17785
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Scaling Law for Large Language Models
Xiong, Yizhe
Chen, Xiansheng
Ye, Xin
Chen, Hui
Lin, Zijia
Lian, Haoran
Su, Zhenpeng
Huang, Wei
Niu, Jianwei
Han, Jungong
Ding, Guiguang
Computation and Language
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in a wide range of tasks, leading to increasing attention towards the research on how scaling LLMs affects their performance. Existing works, termed Scaling Laws, have discovered that the final test loss of LLMs scales as power-laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size. However, the temporal change of the test loss of an LLM throughout its pre-training process remains unexplored, though it is valuable in many aspects, such as selecting better hyperparameters \textit{directly} on the target LLM. In this paper, we propose the novel concept of Temporal Scaling Law, studying how the test loss of an LLM evolves as the training steps scale up. In contrast to modeling the test loss as a whole in a coarse-grained manner, we break it down and dive into the fine-grained test loss of each token position, and further develop a dynamic hyperbolic-law. Afterwards, we derive the much more precise temporal scaling law by studying the temporal patterns of the parameters in the dynamic hyperbolic-law. Results on both in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) validation datasets demonstrate that our temporal scaling law accurately predicts the test loss of LLMs across training steps. Our temporal scaling law has broad practical applications. First, it enables direct and efficient hyperparameter selection on the target LLM, such as data mixture proportions. Secondly, viewing the LLM pre-training dynamics from the token position granularity provides some insights to enhance the understanding of LLM pre-training.
title Temporal Scaling Law for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17785