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Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models

Canonical reference. 84% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.

878 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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Nearly Optimal Attention Coresets

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Efficient Training on Multiple Consumer GPUs with RoundPipe

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

RoundPipe achieves near-zero-bubble pipeline parallelism for LLM training on consumer GPUs by dynamically dispatching computation stages round-robin, yielding 1.48-2.16x speedups and enabling 235B model fine-tuning on 8x RTX 4090.

Large Language Diffusion Models

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

LLaDA is a scalable diffusion-based language model that matches autoregressive LLMs like LLaMA3 8B on tasks and surpasses GPT-4o on reversal poem completion.

KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

cs.LG · 2024-04-30 · conditional · novelty 8.0

KANs with learnable univariate spline activations on edges achieve better accuracy than MLPs with fewer parameters, faster scaling, and direct visualization for scientific discovery.

The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling

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

The Pile is a newly constructed 825 GiB dataset from 22 diverse sources that enables language models to achieve better performance on academic, professional, and cross-domain tasks than models trained on Common Crawl variants.

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 29 of 29 citing papers after filters.

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  • Scaling Laws for Reward Model Overoptimization cs.LG · 2022-10-19 · unverdicted · none · ref 15 · internal anchor

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