arXiv AI

Item Response Scaling Laws: A Measurement Theory Approach for Efficient and Generalizable Neural Scaling Estimation

arXiv:2606. 07616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws provide a fundamental framework for understanding the performance of Language Models (LMs), yet deriving them requires prohibitively expensive evaluations across thousands of checkpoints or millions of inference samples.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Efficiently Estimating Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Laws through Power-Law Entropy Search

The paper introduces Power‑Law Entropy Search (PLES), a computational‑cost‑aware acquisition function that uses multi‑fidelity Bayesian optimization to efficiently estimate optimal hyperparameter scaling laws for large language model training. PLES focuses on reducing the overall uncertainty of scaling law estimates rather than optimizing a single objective, selecting configurations that maximize uncertainty reduction per unit computational cost. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks, surrogate models, and real LLM pre‑training runs show that PLES converges to accurate scaling laws using less than one‑tenth of the computational budget required by conventional grid search and other baselines.

By Zhiliang Chen, Sebastian Ament, David Eriksson, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy, Jihao Andreas Lin
arXiv AI
Aug 25

What Transfers from Text to Vision? Capability Scaling Laws and Transfer Dynamics for VLMs

The paper introduces the Capability-Driven Multimodal Scaling Law, a cross-family framework that predicts vision-language model (VLM) benchmark accuracy from a low-dimensional textual capability score extracted via PCA. By training over 150 VLMs on 34 large language models across seven families, the authors demonstrate that the law accurately extrapolates transfer rates from 8B to 72B‑parameter backbones, predicts full training trajectories, and generalizes to unseen model families. The study also reveals actionable insights, such as certain textual benchmarks negatively correlating with multimodal performance and base LLMs outperforming instruction-tuned counterparts as VLM backbones due to higher absorption rates.

By Ziran Li, Qiang Wang, Zhengyu Chen, Shanglin Lei, Borun Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Pruning Laws for Large Language Models

arXiv:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...

By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Negligible in Size, Significant in Effect: On Scale Vectors in Large Language 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