arXiv:2507.14871cs.CL2025-07被引 6

小模型也能学出大语言模型的关键能力,且可替代复杂结构。

Tiny language models

  • 用微型BERT在维基子集上预训练,验证小模型预训练有效性。
  • 预训练数据越多、词汇重叠越高,小模型性能提升越明显。
  • 多个浅层小模型组合可达到深层模型效果,适合低延迟场景。

自然语言处理的重要成就依赖于大规模预训练的复杂变换器架构。然而,大模型预训练需巨大算力,仅少数公司可承担,限制了广泛研究参与。本文探索微型语言模型(TLMs)是否具备大模型的核心特征。结果表明,即使在极小规模下,预训练模型在分类任务上也显著优于未预训练模型,且性能差距随预训练数据量增加和与下游数据的词汇重叠度提高而增大。此外,通过多个独立预训练的浅层架构构成软集成,可复现深层预训练模型的分类准确率,实现低延迟部署。实验基于在维基子集上预训练的BERT-6及BERT-1变体,在FewRel、AGNews和DBPedia分类任务上评估。研究结果提示,微型模型或可模拟人类语言习得机制,尤其对儿童青少年语言发展具有启发意义。数据与代码已开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A prominent achievement of natural language processing (NLP) is its ability to understand and generate meaningful human language. This capability relies on complex feedforward transformer block architectures pre-trained on large language models (LLMs). However, LLM pre-training is currently feasible only for a few dominant companies due to the immense computational resources required, limiting broader research participation. This creates a critical need for more accessible alternatives. In this study, we explore whether tiny language models (TLMs) exhibit the same key qualitative features of LLMs. We demonstrate that TLMs exhibit a clear performance gap between pre-trained and non-pre-trained models across classification tasks, indicating the effectiveness of pre-training, even at a tiny scale. The performance gap increases with the size of the pre-training dataset and with greater overlap between tokens in the pre-training and classification datasets. Furthermore, the classification accuracy achieved by a pre-trained deep TLM architecture can be replicated through a soft committee of multiple, independently pre-trained shallow architectures, enabling low-latency TLMs without affecting classification accuracy. Our results are based on pre-training BERT-6 and variants of BERT-1 on subsets of the Wikipedia dataset and evaluating their performance on FewRel, AGNews, and DBPedia classification tasks. Future research on TLM is expected to further illuminate the mechanisms underlying NLP, especially given that its biologically inspired models suggest that TLMs may be sufficient for children or adolescents to develop language. The data and code that support the findings of this study are openly available on https://github.com/Rg32601/Tiny-Language-Models .

小模型预训练BERT低延迟

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