In plain words: Ten neural network designs, from Transformers to MLP-Mixers, were trained at growing sizes and tested on pretraining and transfer tasks to see how their built-in assumptions affect scaling. The best design changed with size, so a winner at one scale can lose at another.
Abstract · Scaling Laws vs Model Architectures: How does Inductive Bias Influence Scaling?
There have been a lot of interest in the scaling properties of Transformer models. However, not much has been done on the front of investigating the effect of scaling properties of different inductive biases and model architectures. Do model architectures scale differently? If so, how does inductive bias affect scaling behaviour? How does this influence upstream (pretraining) and downstream (transfer)? This paper conducts a systematic study of scaling behaviour of ten diverse model architectures such as Transformers, Switch Transformers, Universal Transformers, Dynamic convolutions, Performers, and recently proposed MLP-Mixers. Via extensive experiments, we show that (1) architecture is an indeed an important consideration when performing scaling and (2) the best performing model can fluctuate at different scales. We believe that the findings outlined in this work has significant implications to how model architectures are currently evaluated in the community.
Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Won Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Q. Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler
arXiv:2207.10551 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted Jul 21, 2022
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