发现大模型中微小的缩放向量对训练效果至关重要,提出三项轻量改进策略
Negligible in Size, Significant in Effect: On Scale Vectors in Large Language Models
- 揭示缩放向量通过自增强预处理机制改善优化而非提升表达能力
- 证明权重衰减对输入归一化层有益、输出归一化层有害,作用机制不同
- 设计三项轻量级改进:分支异构、位置优化、幅度方向重参数化,均有效
现代大语言模型中的归一化层包含确定性归一化操作和可学习的缩放向量。尽管归一化操作被广泛研究,缩放向量的作用却仍不清晰。本文从表达能力、优化和结构角度系统研究缩放向量。实验表明,尽管其参数占比极小,移除后会显著降低预训练性能。理论分析显示,在Pre-Norm架构中,缩放向量不增加表达能力,而是通过自增强预处理效应改善后续线性映射的优化。进一步区分输入归一化与输出归一化层,理论上证明权重衰减对前者有益而对后者有害。据此提出三项轻量且互补的改进:分支特定异构性、在线性映射周围优化放置位置、幅度-方向重参数化。理论与实验均验证各项改进持续有效。最终整合为统一缩放向量策略,在0.12B至2B参数的密集模型与专家混合模型上,覆盖多种优化器与学习率调度,在工业级词元预算下进行大规模预训练,结果始终优于调优基线,实现更低终端损失与更优扩展行为,且增加参数与计算开销可忽略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Normalization layers in modern large language models (LLMs) consist of a deterministic normalization operation and a learnable scale vector. While the normalization operation has been extensively studied, the scale vector remains poorly understood despite its ubiquitous use. In this work, we present a systematic study of scale vectors in LLMs from the perspectives of expressivity, optimization, and architectural structure. First, we show empirically that although scale vectors constitute only a negligible fraction of model parameters, removing them substantially degrades LLM pre-training. Our theory further shows that, in Pre-Norm architectures, scale vectors do not increase expressivity; instead, they improve optimization through a self-amplifying preconditioning effect on subsequent linear mappings. Second, we investigate the role of weight decay for scale vectors. By distinguishing Input-Norm and Output-Norm layers, we theoretically show that weight decay is beneficial for the former but harmful for the latter, due to their distinct roles in optimization and expressivity. Third, motivated by this understanding, we propose three lightweight and complementary improvements to scale vectors: branch-specific heterogeneity, improved placement around linear mappings, and magnitude-direction reparameterization. Both theory and experiments show that each improvement yields consistent gains. Finally, we combine these improvements into a unified scale-vector strategy and evaluate it through extensive LLM pre-training experiments on dense and mixture-of-experts models ranging from 0.12B to 2B parameters, across multiple optimizers and learning rate schedules, under industrial-scale token budgets. The unified strategy consistently achieves lower terminal loss than well-tuned baselines and exhibits more favorable scaling behavior, while adding negligible parameter and computational overhead.
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