gzip Predicts Data-dependent Scaling Laws

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Pandey, Rohan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Pandey, Rohan
author_facet Pandey, Rohan
contents Past work has established scaling laws that predict the performance of a neural language model (LM) as a function of its parameter count and the number of tokens it's trained on, enabling optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Are these scaling laws agnostic to training data as some prior work suggests? We generate training datasets of varying complexities by modulating the syntactic properties of a PCFG, finding that 1) scaling laws are sensitive to differences in data complexity and that 2) gzip, a compression algorithm, is an effective predictor of how data complexity impacts scaling properties. We propose a new data-dependent scaling law for LM's that accounts for the training data's gzip-compressibility; its compute-optimal frontier increases in dataset size preference (over parameter count preference) as training data becomes harder to compress.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_16684
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle gzip Predicts Data-dependent Scaling Laws
Pandey, Rohan
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Past work has established scaling laws that predict the performance of a neural language model (LM) as a function of its parameter count and the number of tokens it's trained on, enabling optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Are these scaling laws agnostic to training data as some prior work suggests? We generate training datasets of varying complexities by modulating the syntactic properties of a PCFG, finding that 1) scaling laws are sensitive to differences in data complexity and that 2) gzip, a compression algorithm, is an effective predictor of how data complexity impacts scaling properties. We propose a new data-dependent scaling law for LM's that accounts for the training data's gzip-compressibility; its compute-optimal frontier increases in dataset size preference (over parameter count preference) as training data becomes harder to compress.
title gzip Predicts Data-dependent Scaling Laws
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16684