Explaining Data Mixing Scaling Laws
Recent research has established empirical scaling laws to predict model performance on multi-domain data mixtures. However, a theoretical understanding of these model loss behaviors remains absent. In this work, we propose a unified framework to explain the underlying mechanics of data mixing. Our approach extends theoretical perspectives originally developed for standard neural scaling laws (e.g., Kaplan and Chinchilla) to the multi-domain setting. Based on the distributional assumption that domains overlap on fundamental skills while diverging on specialized skills, we identify two key factors that govern the domain losses of models trained on different data mixtures: \textit{Capacity Competition}, where the allocation of finite model capacity couples domain losses globally, and \textit{Noise Reduction}, where optimal weights shift toward harder-to-learn domains to minimize overall noise. Empirical evaluations show that our framework outperforms existing baselines by fitting the loss landscape with a lower Mean Relative Error and identifying higher-performing training mixtures. Most importantly, our model successfully extrapolates across scales, predicting highly effective mixtures for large, unseen scales using parameters fitted on smaller ones. In addition, our model achieves these results using significantly fewer parameters compared to previous empirical laws. Our code is available at https://github.com/meiqwq/Explaining-Data-Mixing-Scaling-Laws.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
UniMixer: A Unified Architecture for Scaling Laws in Recommendation Systems
In recent years, the scaling laws of recommendation models have attracted increasing attention, which govern the relationship between performance and parameters/FLOPs of recommenders. Currently, there are three mainstrea…
Recommendation SystemsA Tale of Tails: Model Collapse as a Change of Scaling Laws
As AI model size grows, neural scaling laws have become a crucial tool to predict the improvements of large models when increasing capacity and the size of original (human or natural) training data. Yet, the widespread u…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelText GenerationData Mixing Laws: Optimizing Data Mixtures by Predicting Language Modeling Performance
Pretraining data of large language models composes multiple domains (e.g., web texts, academic papers, codes), whose mixture proportions crucially impact the competence of outcome models. While existing endeavors rely on…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingExplaining Scaling Laws of Neural Network Generalization
The test loss of well-trained neural networks often follows precise power-law scaling relations with either the size of the training dataset or the number of parameters in the network. We propose a theory that explains a…
Explaining Context Length Scaling and Bounds for Language Models
Long Context Language Models have drawn great attention in the past few years. There has been work discussing the impact of long context on Language Model performance: some find that long irrelevant context could harm pe…
Language ModelingLanguage Modelling