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Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher

51 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

51 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, and the identification of toxic language, but logical and mathematical reasoning see less benefit. We provide a holistic analysis of the training dataset and model's behaviour, covering the intersection of model scale with bias and toxicity. Finally we discuss the application of language models to AI safety and the mitigation of downstream harms.

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  • abstract Language modelling provides a step towards intelligent communication systems by harnessing large repositories of written human knowledge to better predict and understand the world. In this paper, we present an analysis of Transformer-based language model performance across a wide range of model scales -- from models with tens of millions of parameters up to a 280 billion parameter model called Gopher. These models are evaluated on 152 diverse tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across the majority. Gains from scale are largest in areas such as reading comprehension, fact-checking, an

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representative citing papers

C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings

cs.CL · 2023-09-14 · accept · novelty 7.0

C-Pack releases a new Chinese embedding benchmark, large training dataset, and optimized models that outperform priors by up to 10% on C-MTEB while also delivering English SOTA results.

Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners

cs.CL · 2022-05-24 · accept · novelty 7.0

Adding the fixed prompt 'Let's think step by step' enables large language models to achieve substantial zero-shot gains on arithmetic, symbolic, and logical reasoning benchmarks without any task-specific examples.

A Generalist Agent

cs.AI · 2022-05-12 · accept · novelty 7.0

Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy using one transformer network to handle text, vision, games, and robotics tasks.

OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models

cs.CL · 2022-05-02 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.

Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning

cs.CV · 2022-04-29 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Flamingo models reach new state-of-the-art few-shot results on image and video tasks by bridging frozen vision and language models with cross-attention layers trained on interleaved web-scale data.

When is Warmstarting Effective for Scaling Language Models?

cs.LG · 2026-05-13 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

A 2x growth factor in model warmstarting yields reliable training speedups for language models under 20 tokens/parameter budgets, with an empirical upper bound on effective growth factors.

Towards an AI co-scientist

cs.AI · 2025-02-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

A multi-agent AI system generates novel biomedical hypotheses that show promising experimental validation in drug repurposing for leukemia, new targets for liver fibrosis, and a bacterial gene transfer mechanism.

Reinforced Self-Training (ReST) for Language Modeling

cs.CL · 2023-08-17 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

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.

citing papers explorer

Showing 18 of 18 citing papers after filters.

  • Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models cs.CL · 2022-01-28 · accept · none · ref 50 · internal anchor

    Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.

  • Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks cs.CL · 2022-11-22 · unverdicted · none · ref 24 · internal anchor

    PoT prompting improves numerical reasoning by having language models write programs executed by a computer instead of performing calculations in natural language chains of thought, with an average 12% gain over CoT.

  • Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners cs.CL · 2022-05-24 · accept · none · ref 3 · internal anchor

    Adding the fixed prompt 'Let's think step by step' enables large language models to achieve substantial zero-shot gains on arithmetic, symbolic, and logical reasoning benchmarks without any task-specific examples.

  • Photorealistic Text-to-Image Diffusion Models with Deep Language Understanding cs.CV · 2022-05-23 · accept · none · ref 50 · internal anchor

    Imagen achieves state-of-the-art photorealistic text-to-image generation by scaling a text-only pretrained T5 language model within a diffusion framework, reaching FID 7.27 on COCO without training on it.

  • A Generalist Agent cs.AI · 2022-05-12 · accept · none · ref 47 · internal anchor

    Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy using one transformer network to handle text, vision, games, and robotics tasks.

  • OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models cs.CL · 2022-05-02 · unverdicted · none · ref 279 · internal anchor

    OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.

  • Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning cs.CV · 2022-04-29 · unverdicted · none · ref 87 · internal anchor

    Flamingo models reach new state-of-the-art few-shot results on image and video tasks by bridging frozen vision and language models with cross-attention layers trained on interleaved web-scale data.

  • Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances cs.RO · 2022-04-04 · accept · none · ref 6 · internal anchor

    SayCan combines an LLM's high-level semantic knowledge with robot skill value functions to select only feasible actions, enabling completion of abstract natural-language instructions on a real mobile manipulator.

  • BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model cs.CL · 2022-11-09 · unverdicted · none · ref 120 · internal anchor

    BLOOM is a 176B-parameter open-access multilingual language model trained on the ROOTS corpus that achieves competitive performance on benchmarks, with improved results after multitask prompted finetuning.

  • Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them cs.CL · 2022-10-17 · accept · none · ref 21 · internal anchor

    Chain-of-thought prompting enables large language models to surpass average human performance on 17 of 23 challenging BIG-Bench tasks.

  • GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model cs.CL · 2022-10-05 · accept · none · ref 2 · internal anchor

    GLM-130B is an open 130B-parameter bilingual model that beats GPT-3 davinci on English benchmarks and ERNIE TITAN 3.0 on Chinese benchmarks while supporting efficient INT4 inference on consumer hardware.

  • Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned cs.CL · 2022-08-23 · accept · none · ref 44 · internal anchor

    RLHF-aligned language models show increasing resistance to red teaming with scale up to 52B parameters, unlike prompted or rejection-sampled models, supported by a released dataset of 38,961 attacks.

  • Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know cs.CL · 2022-07-11 · unverdicted · none · ref 76 · internal anchor

    Language models show good calibration when asked to estimate the probability that their own answers are correct, with performance improving as models get larger.

  • Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models cs.CL · 2022-06-15 · unverdicted · none · ref 69 · internal anchor

    Emergent abilities are capabilities present in large language models but absent in smaller ones and cannot be predicted by extrapolating smaller model performance.

  • Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback cs.CL · 2022-04-12 · unverdicted · none · ref 16 · internal anchor

    RLHF alignment training on language models boosts NLP performance, supports skill specialization, enables weekly online updates with fresh human data, and shows a linear relation between RL reward and sqrt(KL divergence from initialization.

  • PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways cs.CL · 2022-04-05 · accept · none · ref 117 · internal anchor

    PaLM 540B demonstrates continued scaling benefits by setting new few-shot SOTA results on hundreds of benchmarks and outperforming humans on BIG-bench.

  • LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications cs.CL · 2022-01-20 · unverdicted · none · ref 24 · internal anchor

    LaMDA shows that fine-tuning on human-value annotations and consulting external knowledge sources significantly improves safety and factual grounding in large dialog models beyond what scaling alone achieves.

  • Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science cs.CL · 2022-11-16 · unverdicted · none · ref 223 · internal anchor

    Galactica, a science-specialized LLM, reports higher scores than GPT-3, Chinchilla, and PaLM on LaTeX knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and medical QA benchmarks while outperforming general models on BIG-bench.