论文精选

研究显示循环结构可改变模型缩放指数,提升计算效率

How Model Growth, Recursion, and Boundary Operators Influence Scaling Exponents

精选理由

朋友,这篇论文挺有意思的,作者发现用循环结构(looping)来改写模型架构,能显著提升计算效率。比如他们用7.4B模型就达到了GPT-3 13B的性能,但算力只用了1/20,这个方法挺有启发性的。

本文提出循环结构(looping)作为模型架构干预手段,可改变预训练阶段的缩放指数。通过增加训练过程中的循环次数实现模型增长,7.4B参数模型在CORE基准上性能接近GPT-3 13B,但计算成本降低约20倍。同时,在标准Transformer中引入边界算子也能带来计算效率提升。

原文 · arXiv cs.LG

How Model Growth, Recursion, and Boundary Operators Influence Scaling Exponents

Scaling laws predict how loss decreases with increases in computation. We show, contrary to conventional wisdom, that architectural interventions can modify scaling exponents in pre-training, leading to exponential improvements in performance with increases in computation. As an anchoring point, we consider the architectural formulation of looped transformers. Although not typically used in this way, looping, also known as recursive depth, provides a mechanism for model growth, by increasing the number of loops during training. Model growth, with and without shared weights, provides the biggest changes to the scaling exponents. In particular, a 7.4B model growth architecture matches GPT-3 13B on CORE with roughly $20\times$ less compute, and has compute efficiency gains that increase with scale. Moreover, simply using a boundary operator in a vanilla transformer, which normalizes and injects an earlier block, also provides increasing compute-efficiency gains, although to a lesser extent. In the data-constrained, multi-epoch setting, standard looping has a useful regularizing effect, where we find it is compute-optimal to increase the number of loops with scale. These results can be understood through the lens of computational depth: for a given computational budget, we wish to increase the usable depth of the transformer, which can lead to efficiency gains that increase with scale.