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Deep Learning Scaling is Predictable, Empirically

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abstract

Deep learning (DL) creates impactful advances following a virtuous recipe: model architecture search, creating large training data sets, and scaling computation. It is widely believed that growing training sets and models should improve accuracy and result in better products. As DL application domains grow, we would like a deeper understanding of the relationships between training set size, computational scale, and model accuracy improvements to advance the state-of-the-art. This paper presents a large scale empirical characterization of generalization error and model size growth as training sets grow. We introduce a methodology for this measurement and test four machine learning domains: machine translation, language modeling, image processing, and speech recognition. Our empirical results show power-law generalization error scaling across a breadth of factors, resulting in power-law exponents---the "steepness" of the learning curve---yet to be explained by theoretical work. Further, model improvements only shift the error but do not appear to affect the power-law exponent. We also show that model size scales sublinearly with data size. These scaling relationships have significant implications on deep learning research, practice, and systems. They can assist model debugging, setting accuracy targets, and decisions about data set growth. They can also guide computing system design and underscore the importance of continued computational scaling.

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  • abstract Deep learning (DL) creates impactful advances following a virtuous recipe: model architecture search, creating large training data sets, and scaling computation. It is widely believed that growing training sets and models should improve accuracy and result in better products. As DL application domains grow, we would like a deeper understanding of the relationships between training set size, computational scale, and model accuracy improvements to advance the state-of-the-art. This paper presents a large scale empirical characterization of generalization error and model size growth as training

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KAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

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Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

cs.CL · 2020-05-28 · accept · novelty 8.0

GPT-3 shows that scaling an autoregressive language model to 175 billion parameters enables strong few-shot performance across diverse NLP tasks via in-context prompting without fine-tuning.

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.

Olivia: Harmonizing Time Series Foundation Models with Power Spectral Density

cs.LG · 2026-05-17 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Olivia harmonizes time series datasets via normalized power spectral density using a Harmonizer module and resonator-based HarmonicAttention, achieving state-of-the-art zero-shot, few-shot, and full-shot forecasting on TSLib, GIFT-Eval, and GluonTS benchmarks.

Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling

cs.LG · 2020-10-28 · accept · novelty 7.0

Autoregressive transformers follow power-law scaling laws for cross-entropy loss with nearly universal exponents relating optimal model size to compute budget across four domains.

Revisiting the Volume Hypothesis

cs.LG · 2026-06-30 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

The generalization advantage of SGD over random sampling diminishes with growing training set size in binary networks, as measured by joint density of states over train and test accuracy.

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