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Resolving Discrepancies in Compute-Optimal Scaling of Language Models

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arxiv 2406.19146 v4 pith:CCXZ5FRG submitted 2024-06-27 cs.LG cs.CL

classification cs.LGcs.CL
keywords scalinghoffmannlawsbatchessentialfactorskaplanlearning
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

Kaplan et al. and Hoffmann et al. developed influential scaling laws for the optimal model size as a function of the compute budget, but these laws yield substantially different predictions. We explain the discrepancy by reproducing the Kaplan scaling law on two datasets (OpenWebText2 and RefinedWeb) and identifying three factors causing the difference: last layer computational cost, warmup duration, and scale-dependent optimizer tuning. With these factors corrected, we obtain excellent agreement with the Hoffmann et al. (i.e., "Chinchilla") scaling law. Counter to a hypothesis of Hoffmann et al., we find that careful learning rate decay is not essential for the validity of their scaling law. As a secondary result, we derive scaling laws for the optimal learning rate and batch size, finding that tuning the AdamW $\beta_2$ parameter is essential at lower batch sizes.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. How Much Is a Dataset Worth? Scaling Laws, the Vendi Score, and Matrix Spectral Functions

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    Vendi Score and scaling-law objectives belong to the class of matrix spectral functions, which are submodular, enabling efficient greedy selection of training data that outperforms random subsets in predicting held-ou...

  2. Deriving Neural Scaling Laws from the statistics of natural language

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    The data-limited loss exponent of LLMs equals γ/(2β), where γ is the context-length decay of next-token entropy and β is the lag decay of token correlations, matching experiments on two corpora.

  3. Sub-Scaling Laws: On the Role of Data Density and Training Strategies in LLMs

    cs.LG 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    High data redundancy and over-training decelerate LLM performance gains, and the authors fit a sub-optimal scaling law with logistic correction terms to predict the slowdown.

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