arXiv:2509.14786cs.LG2025-09被引 23

通过优化正则化与模型集成,实现超高效预训练,大幅减少所需数据量。

Pre-training under infinite compute

  • 采用更大权重衰减(标准30倍)和模型集成,避免过拟合。
  • 在2亿词元下性能达理论最优,比基线少用5.17倍数据。
  • 可将集成模型压缩8倍,仍保留83%收益,适合资源受限场景。

随着算力增长远超可用于语言模型预训练的网页文本,我们探讨在固定数据量且无算力限制下的预训练方法。现有增加训练轮次和参数量的方法终将过拟合,我们通过合理调节正则化显著改进,发现最优权重衰减是标准实践的30倍。所提正则化方案随参数量按简单幂律单调下降损失,据此估计其渐近性能而非固定算力下的表现。进一步发现,独立训练模型的集成能获得显著更低的损失渐近值。最佳组合策略(训练轮次、正则化、参数缩放、集成缩放)在2亿词元下仅需基线5.17倍的数据量,并预测该优势在更高词元预算下依然成立。我们还发现,可通过知识蒸馏将集成模型压缩为8倍小的教师模型,仍保留83%的集成收益。这些干预措施在验证损失上表现优异,且泛化至下游任务:预训练评估提升9%,数学中段数据继续预训练的数据效率提升17.5倍。结果表明,算法优化可在算力充裕时代实现显著更高效的语言模型预训练。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Since compute grows much faster than web text available for language model pre-training, we ask how one should approach pre-training under fixed data and no compute constraints. We first show that existing data-constrained approaches of increasing epoch count and parameter count eventually overfit, and we significantly improve upon such recipes by properly tuning regularization, finding that the optimal weight decay is $30\times$ larger than standard practice. Since our regularized recipe monotonically decreases loss following a simple power law in parameter count, we estimate its best possible performance via the asymptote of its scaling law rather than the performance at a fixed compute budget. We then identify that ensembling independently trained models achieves a significantly lower loss asymptote than the regularized recipe. Our best intervention combining epoching, regularization, parameter scaling, and ensemble scaling achieves an asymptote at 200M tokens using $5.17\times$ less data than our baseline, and our data scaling laws predict that this improvement persists at higher token budgets. We find that our data efficiency gains can be realized at much smaller parameter counts as we can distill an ensemble into a student model that is 8$\times$ smaller and retains $83\%$ of the ensembling benefit. Finally, our interventions designed for validation loss generalize to downstream benchmarks, achieving a $9\%$ improvement for pre-training evals and a $17.5\times$ data efficiency improvement over continued pre-training on math mid-training data. Our results show that simple algorithmic improvements can enable significantly more data-efficient pre-training in a compute-rich future.

预训练数据效率模型集成正则化

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