The interplay between domain specialization and model size
Scaling laws for language models have often focused on finding the optimal model size and token count for training from scratch. However, achieving this optimal balance requires significant compute resources due to the extensive data demands when training models from randomly-initialized weights. Continued pretraining offers a cost-effective alternative, leveraging the compute investment from pretrained models to incorporate new knowledge without requiring extensive new data. Recent findings suggest that data quality influences constants in scaling laws, thereby altering the optimal parameter-token allocation ratio. Building on this insight, we investigate the interplay between domain specialization and model size during continued pretraining under compute-constrained scenarios. Our goal is to identify an optimal training regime for this scenario and detect patterns in this interplay that can be generalized across different model sizes and domains. To compare general and specialized training, we filtered a web-based dataset to extract data from three domains: legal, medical, and accounting. We pretrained models with 1.5B, 3B, 7B, and 14B parameters on both the unfiltered and filtered datasets, then evaluated their performance on domain-specific exams. Results show that as model size increases, specialized models outperform general models while requiring less training compute. Additionally, their growing compute efficiency leads to reduced forgetting of previously learned knowledge.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
DBES: A Systematic Benchmark and Metric Suite for Evaluating Expert Specialization in Large-Scale MoEs
Expert specialization in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models remains poorly understood, with traditional evaluations conflating architectural load-balancing with functional specialization. We introduce DBES, a comprehensive …
Optimal Splitting of Language Models from Mixtures to Specialized Domains
Language models achieve impressive performance on a variety of knowledge, language, and reasoning tasks due to the scale and diversity of pretraining data available. The standard training recipe is a two-stage paradigm: …
Learn from Weaknesses: Automated Domain Specialization for Small Computer-Use Agents
Computer-use agents (CUAs) have recently made substantial progress, but deploying a separate large expert for each software domain remains expensive. Small open computer-use agents are more practical specialization targe…
How Many Experts Are Enough? Towards Optimal Semantic Specialization for Mixture-of-Experts
Finding the optimal configuration of Sparse Mixture-ofExperts (SMoE) that maximizes semantic differentiation among experts is essential for exploiting the full potential of MoE architectures. However, existing SMoE frame…
Emergent Specialization in Learner Populations: Competition as the Source of Diversity
How can populations of learners develop coordinated, diverse behaviors without explicit communication or diversity incentives? We demonstrate that competition alone is sufficient to induce emergent specialization -- lear…
Weather Forecasting