In plain words: Changing the grammar complexity of training text, the study measures how a model improves with more parameters and data, and uses gzip's compression ratio to predict the change. Scaling depends on the data: harder-to-compress text favors spending compute on more data, not bigger models.
Abstract · gzip Predicts Data-dependent Scaling Laws
Past work has established scaling laws that predict the performance of a neural language model (LM) as a function of its parameter count and the number of tokens it's trained on, enabling optimal allocation of a fixed compute budget. Are these scaling laws agnostic to training data as some prior work suggests? We generate training datasets of varying complexities by modulating the syntactic properties of a PCFG, finding that 1) scaling laws are sensitive to differences in data complexity and that 2) gzip, a compression algorithm, is an effective predictor of how data complexity impacts scaling properties. We propose a new data-dependent scaling law for LM's that accounts for the training data's gzip-compressibility; its compute-optimal frontier increases in dataset size preference (over parameter count preference) as training data becomes harder to compress.
Rohan Pandey
arXiv:2405.16684 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted May 26, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · 9 pages, 9 figures