Scaling laws promised cost-effective experiments; six years later, they have yet to fully deliver. Instead, researchers have found them unreliable at small scales (starting at 4M parameters) and concluded that sizable models cannot be avoided.
arXiv:2602. 10545v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern large-scale neural networks are often trained and released in multiple sizes to accommodate diverse inference budgets.
By Yuxin Ma, Nan Chen, Mateo D\'iaz, Soufiane Hayou, Dmitriy Kunisky, Soledad Villar
The paper introduces a new closed‑form scaling law that extends Chinchilla’s original formula to handle data‑constrained regimes. It decomposes loss into undercapacity, undertraining, and overfitting components, saturating between an irreducible loss and an uninformed baseline. The authors validate the model on diverse architectures and domains, achieving state‑of‑the‑art RMSE across multiple LLM scaling‑law grids and enabling cost‑aware training allocations.
By Christopher M. Bryant, Hao Liu
arXiv:2605. 29548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Larger models learn tasks smaller models do not.
By Jing Huang, Daniel Wurgaft, Rachit Bansal, Laura Ruis, Naomi Saphra, David Alvarez-Melis, Andrew Kyle Lampinen, Christopher Potts, Ekdeep Singh Lubana
arXiv:2606. 27282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy.
By Lang Huang, Jinglue Xu, Luke Darlow
arXiv:2610. 01172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study learning rate (LR) scaling for hybrid architectures combining Transformer and State-Space Model (SSM) blocks, a class adopted by several recent production language models.
By Jimin Seo, Gyubok Lee, Yeonsik Jo, Kiwoong Yoo, Yeongoon Kim, Minhae Oh, Jin Woo Koo, Suhwan Kim, Nakyung Lee, Minsik Seol, Idris Nechnech, Jaehyeon Kim, Giho Lee, Jungwoo Lee
arXiv:2609.08690v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models expand model capacity without a proportional increase in training compute, but increasing sparsity makes reliable hyp...
By Changxin Tian, Kunlong Chen, Jia Liu, Ziqi Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou
arXiv:2608. 20061v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures significantly expand model capacity without a proportional increase in computational cost.
By Nayeon Kim, Hojin Lee, Yunju Bak, Jaesun Park, Boseop Kim
The paper proposes a framework to reduce the cost of constructing scaling laws for large foundation models by treating data collection as a Bayesian optimization problem. It shows that expanding the compute budget progressively and augmenting observed configurations with surrogate-fantasized evaluations can recover a broad experimental grid, enabling accurate scaling law fitting without training every configuration. This approach can achieve computational savings of up to 10–100× compared to a full dense grid.
By Abhash Kumar Jha, Diana Alexandra Onu\c{t}u, Neeratyoy Mallik, Swagatam Haldar, Sam Laing, Niccol\`o Ajroldi, Shiwei Liu, Joaquin Vanschoren, Aaron Klein
The paper demonstrates that architectural changes—specifically looped transformers and boundary operators—can alter scaling exponents in pre‑training, yielding exponential performance gains for a given computational budget. Looping, or recursive depth, enables model growth that matches larger models (e.g., a 7.4B looped architecture matching GPT‑3 13B) with significantly less compute, while boundary operators provide additional, though smaller, efficiency improvements. In data‑constrained, multi‑epoch scenarios, increasing loops with scale serves as a useful regularizer, suggesting that deeper computational depth drives compute‑efficiency gains that grow with model size.
By Zixi Chen, Akshay Vegesna, Samip Dahal, Andrew Gordon Wilson
Time-series forecasting research has been moving steadily toward larger architectures, from specialized transformers to general-purpose foundation models, on the assumption that capacity is what unlocks accuracy. We take the opposite position: most of the gap can be closed at far lower cost by tuning preprocessing rather than scaling models.
The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.
By Mingze Wang, Shuchen Zhu, Yuxin Fang, Binghui Li, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong