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Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

Canonical reference. 83% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

798 Pith papers citing it
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abstract

We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are significantly more sample-efficient, such that optimally compute-efficient training involves training very large models on a relatively modest amount of data and stopping significantly before convergence.

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  • abstract We study empirical scaling laws for language model performance on the cross-entropy loss. The loss scales as a power-law with model size, dataset size, and the amount of compute used for training, with some trends spanning more than seven orders of magnitude. Other architectural details such as network width or depth have minimal effects within a wide range. Simple equations govern the dependence of overfitting on model/dataset size and the dependence of training speed on model size. These relationships allow us to determine the optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Larger models are s

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cs.DC · 2026-04-29 · conditional · novelty 8.0

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cs.CL · 2025-02-14 · unverdicted · novelty 8.0

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KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

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cs.CL · 2020-12-31 · conditional · novelty 8.0

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Smooth Scaling Laws Hide Stepwise Token Learning

cs.CL · 2026-06-29 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Token loss trajectories follow localized sigmoids whose learning-time spectrum quantitatively reconstructs scaling-law derivatives on T, D, and M axes and enables faster training via distribution reshaping.

citing papers explorer

Showing 50 of 798 citing papers.

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