REVIEW 7 cited by
Scaling Laws for Neural Machine Translation
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
Scaling Laws for Neural Machine Translation
read the original abstract
We present an empirical study of scaling properties of encoder-decoder Transformer models used in neural machine translation (NMT). We show that cross-entropy loss as a function of model size follows a certain scaling law. Specifically (i) We propose a formula which describes the scaling behavior of cross-entropy loss as a bivariate function of encoder and decoder size, and show that it gives accurate predictions under a variety of scaling approaches and languages; we show that the total number of parameters alone is not sufficient for such purposes. (ii) We observe different power law exponents when scaling the decoder vs scaling the encoder, and provide recommendations for optimal allocation of encoder/decoder capacity based on this observation. (iii) We also report that the scaling behavior of the model is acutely influenced by composition bias of the train/test sets, which we define as any deviation from naturally generated text (either via machine generated or human translated text). We observe that natural text on the target side enjoys scaling, which manifests as successful reduction of the cross-entropy loss. (iv) Finally, we investigate the relationship between the cross-entropy loss and the quality of the generated translations. We find two different behaviors, depending on the nature of the test data. For test sets which were originally translated from target language to source language, both loss and BLEU score improve as model size increases. In contrast, for test sets originally translated from source language to target language, the loss improves, but the BLEU score stops improving after a certain threshold. We release generated text from all models used in this study.
Forward citations
Cited by 7 Pith papers
-
Pythia: A Suite for Analyzing Large Language Models Across Training and Scaling
Pythia releases 16 identically trained LLMs with full checkpoints and data tools to study training dynamics, scaling, memorization, and bias in language models.
-
Two-Point Deterministic Equivalence for Stochastic Gradient Dynamics in Linear Models
Derives a novel two-point deterministic equivalence for random matrix resolvents to obtain unified asymptotics for SGD-trained linear regression, kernel regression, and random feature models.
-
Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models
The paper compiles practical lessons on reproducible LM evaluation and introduces the lm-eval library to mitigate common methodological problems in NLP.
-
Scaling and renormalization in high-dimensional regression
Ridge regression in high dimensions exhibits power-law scalings because covariance fluctuations renormalize the ridge parameter, allowing closed-form error expressions and bias-variance decompositions for random featu...
-
Reinforced Self-Training (ReST) for Language Modeling
ReST improves LLM translation quality on benchmarks via offline RL on self-generated data, achieving gains in a compute-efficient way compared to typical RLHF.
-
Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models
Repeating training data up to 4 epochs yields negligible loss increase versus unique data for fixed compute, and a new scaling law accounts for the decaying value of repeated tokens and excess parameters.
-
Law of Neural Interaction: Depth-Width Shape, Interaction Efficiency, and Generalization
Tuning the depth-width ratio positions models in an efficient neural interaction interval that correlates with better generalization under fixed budgets and remains stable with scale.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.