Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models

Muennighoff et al., 2023, Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models (Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023))

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2 cards in “5 Results: Resource Allocation for Data-Constrained Scaling” · whole deck

5 Results: Resource Allocation for Data-Constrained Scaling

  1. With only 100M unique tokens, how should compute be spent?
    Far beyond the one-epoch optimum: training 20–60× more parameters and epochs (about 7,000× more compute) cut loss by more than half, so one-epoch models under-use their data.
  2. How does the data-constrained efficient frontier differ from Chinchilla’s?
    Excess parameters lose value faster than repeated data, so additional compute should go mostly to more epochs rather than equally to parameters and data. A model built this way with 27% fewer parameters beat the Chinchilla-recommended one for the same compute and data, and would also be cheaper at inference.

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