让大模型每个词多算几步,不改结构也能更强。
Hidden Decoding at Scale: Latent Computation Scaling for Large Language Models

- 用多路并行嵌入扩展序列长度,不加层数也能提升计算量。
- 在800亿和6170亿参数模型上验证有效,性能超越基础版。
- 适合追求低成本升级大模型的团队,尤其适合已部署的模型。
大语言模型的扩展主要依赖于增大Transformer结构,但对已有强模型而言,这需要昂贵的重新预训练。本文研究在固定模型结构的前提下,通过增加每个令牌的计算量来持续提升性能的可行性。传统循环结构难以与大规模训练中的流水线并行兼容。为此提出隐式解码(Hidden Decoding),在继续预训练阶段沿序列长度方向扩展,将每个令牌拆分为n路独立嵌入流,保留中间流的键值缓存作为上下文,实现无新增层的内部计算增强。为控制成本,引入流因子化注意力(Stream-Factorized Attention):多数层仅在单一流内注意力,仅少数层跨流混合,使注意力复杂度从二次方降至近线性。实验表明,在前沿规模下,我们训练了WeLM-HD4-80B和WeLM-HD4-617B(n=4),性能均优于对应的非隐式解码基线,首次在百亿以上MoE模型规模上实现序列长度扩展。不同扩展倍数下性能随n增长,证明该方法是前沿大模型固定架构下的实用扩展路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) has been driven mainly by enlarging the Transformer backbone, but for an already-strong model this requires another round of costly pretraining. We study whether an existing backbone can keep improving by allocating more computation to each token while leaving the Transformer backbone fixed. Depth-recurrent (looped) Transformers pursue this goal but are hard to scale, because looped computation does not fit naturally with the pipeline parallelism used to train the largest models. We add computation along the sequence-length dimension, where the extra computation is simply a longer input and stays compatible with standard large-model training. We propose Hidden Decoding, a sequence-length scaling method applied during continued pretraining (CPT). It expands each token into n streams with independent embedding tables and keeps the intermediate streams' key-value cache as context, so each token performs more internal computation without adding or widening Transformer layers. To keep this affordable at scale, we introduce Stream-Factorized Attention, in which most layers attend only within each stream and only a few layers mix across streams, reducing the attention cost from quadratic to roughly linear in n. Experiments support two scaling results. At frontier scale, we train WeLM-HD4-80B and WeLM-HD4-617B at n=4 and improve their matched non-HD baselines, making Hidden Decoding the first demonstrated sequence-length scaling method at the 100B+ MoE scale. Across expansion factors, the gains grow as n increases, showing that sequence-length expansion is a practical fixed-backbone scaling path for frontier-scale LLMs.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。