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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2024
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15051 |
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| _version_ | 1866913513498214400 |
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| author | Caillaut, Gaëtan Qader, Raheel Nakhlé, Mariam Liu, Jingshu Barthélemy, Jean-Gabriel |
| author_facet | Caillaut, Gaëtan Qader, Raheel Nakhlé, Mariam Liu, Jingshu Barthélemy, Jean-Gabriel |
| contents | Recent studies have showcased remarkable capabilities of decoder-only models in many NLP tasks, including translation. Yet, the machine translation field has been largely dominated by encoder-decoder models based on the Transformer architecture. As a consequence, scaling laws of encoder-decoder models for neural machine translation have already been well studied, but decoder-only models have received less attention. This work explores the scaling laws of decoder-only models on the multilingual and multidomain translation task. We trained a collection of six decoder-only models, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters, on a sentence-level, multilingual and multidomain dataset. We conducted a series of experiments showing that the loss of decoder-only models can be estimated using a scaling law similar to the one discovered for large language models, but we also show that this scaling law has difficulties to generalize to too large models or to a different data distribution. We also study different scaling methods and show that scaling the depth and the width of a model lead to similar test loss improvements, but with different impact on the model's efficiency. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_15051 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Scaling Laws of Decoder-Only Models on the Multilingual Machine Translation Task Caillaut, Gaëtan Qader, Raheel Nakhlé, Mariam Liu, Jingshu Barthélemy, Jean-Gabriel Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Recent studies have showcased remarkable capabilities of decoder-only models in many NLP tasks, including translation. Yet, the machine translation field has been largely dominated by encoder-decoder models based on the Transformer architecture. As a consequence, scaling laws of encoder-decoder models for neural machine translation have already been well studied, but decoder-only models have received less attention. This work explores the scaling laws of decoder-only models on the multilingual and multidomain translation task. We trained a collection of six decoder-only models, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters, on a sentence-level, multilingual and multidomain dataset. We conducted a series of experiments showing that the loss of decoder-only models can be estimated using a scaling law similar to the one discovered for large language models, but we also show that this scaling law has difficulties to generalize to too large models or to a different data distribution. We also study different scaling methods and show that scaling the depth and the width of a model lead to similar test loss improvements, but with different impact on the model's efficiency. |
| title | Scaling Laws of Decoder-Only Models on the Multilingual Machine Translation Task |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.15051 |