In plain words: Instead of adding parameters or generating more words, this runs the same model several times at once on differently transformed inputs and blends results. It matches a bigger model's gains while its memory grows up to 22 times less and latency 6 times less.
Abstract
It is commonly believed that scaling language models should commit a significant space or time cost, by increasing the parameters (parameter scaling) or output tokens (inference-time scaling). We introduce the third and more inference-efficient scaling paradigm: increasing the model's parallel computation during both training and inference time. We apply $P$ diverse and learnable transformations to the input, execute forward passes of the model in parallel, and dynamically aggregate the $P$ outputs. This method, namely parallel scaling (ParScale), scales parallel computation by reusing existing parameters and can be applied to any model structure, optimization procedure, data, or task. We theoretically propose a new scaling law and validate it through large-scale pre-training, which shows that a model with $P$ parallel streams is similar to scaling the parameters by $O(\log P)$ while showing superior inference efficiency. For example, ParScale can use up to 22$\times$ less memory increase and 6$\times$ less latency increase compared to parameter scaling that achieves the same performance improvement. It can also recycle an off-the-shelf pre-trained model into a parallelly scaled one by post-training on a small amount of tokens, further reducing the training budget. The new scaling law we discovered potentially facilitates the deployment of more powerful models in low-resource scenarios, and provides an alternative perspective for the role of computation in machine learning.
Mouxiang Chen, Binyuan Hui, Zeyu Cui, Jiaxi Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Jianling Sun, Junyang Lin, Zhongxin Liu
arXiv:2505.10475 · cs.LG, cs.CL · submitted May 15, 2025
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Compared to scaling parameters alone, the same performance increase using their technique may be achieved with 22x less increase in memory and 6x less latency increase.