Cited by 45Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

Revisiting neural scaling laws in language and vision

Open access
Alabdulmohsin, Ibrahim, Neyshabur, Behnam, Zhai, Xiaohua·2022·Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35

Abstract

The remarkable progress in deep learning in recent years is largely driven by improvements in scale, where bigger models are trained on larger datasets for longer schedules. To predict the benefit of scale empirically, we argue for a more rigorous methodology based on the extrapolation loss, instead of reporting the best-fitting (interpolating) parameters. We then present a recipe for estimating scaling law parameters reliably from learning curves. We demonstrate that it extrapolates more accurately than previous methods in a wide range of architecture families across several domains, including image classification, neural machine translation (NMT) and language modeling, in addition to tasks from the BIG-Bench evaluation benchmark. Finally, we release a benchmark dataset comprising of 90 evaluation tasks to facilitate research in this domain.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.52202/068431-1620

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Our findings suggest that evolution of embodied intelligent behavior, biological or artificial, may require coordinated scaling of visual acuity and processing.

    “While AI systems focus on scaling neural, data, and computation capacity (30, 31, 74–77), our findings suggest that evolution of embodied intelligent behavior (biological or artificial) may require coordinated scaling of visual acuity and processing.”

    From What if eye...? Computationally recreating vision evolution (2025) · cites this paper as [77]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Still being checked.

Research works printed but not linked: 36

  1. [1][1] Samira Abnar, Mostafa Dehghani, Behnam Neyshabur, and Hanie Sedghi. Exploring the limits of large scale pre-training. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.02095 , 2021. - · arXiv
  2. [2][2] Yasaman Bahri, Ethan Dyer, Jared Kaplan, Jaehoon Lee, and Utkarsh Sharma. Explaining neural scaling laws. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.06701 , 2021. - · arXiv
  3. [3][3] Yamini Bansal, Behrooz Ghorbani, Ankush Garg, Biao Zhang, Maxim Krikun, Colin Cherry, Behnam Neyshabur, and Orhan Firat. Data scaling laws in NMT: The effect of noise and architecture. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.01994 , 2022. - · arXiv
  4. [5][5] Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Amélie Royer, Larisa Markeeva, Rohan Anil, and Alexander Kolesnikov. Knowledge distillation: A good teacher is patient and consistent. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.05237 , 2021. - · arXiv
  5. [7][7] Olivier Bousquet, Steve Hanneke, Shay Moran, Ramon Van Handel, and Amir Yehudayoff. A theory of universal learning. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual ACM SIGACT Symposium on Theory of Computing , pages 532-541, 2021. -
  6. [8][8] Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. Language models are few-shot learners. NeurIPS , 33:1877-1901, 2020. -
  7. [9][9] Junghwan Cho, Kyewook Lee, Ellie Shin, Garry Choy, and Synho Do. How much data is needed to train a medical image deep learning system to achieve necessary high accuracy? arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06348 , 2015. - · arXiv
  8. [10][10] Zihang Dai, Hanxiao Liu, Quoc V Le, and Mingxing Tan. Coatnet: Marrying convolution and attention for all data sizes. NeurIPS , 34:3965-3977, 2021. -
  9. [11][11] Jia Deng, Wei Dong, Richard Socher, Li-Jia Li, Kai Li, and Li Fei-Fei. Imagenet: A large-scale hierarchical image database. In CVPR , 2009. -
  10. [12][12] Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova. Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805 , 2018. - · arXiv
  11. [13][13] Tobias Domhan, Jost Tobias Springenberg, and Frank Hutter. Speeding up automatic hyperparameter optimization of deep neural networks by extrapolation of learning curves. In IJCAI , 2015. -
  12. [14][14] Alexey Dosovitskiy, Lucas Beyer, Alexander Kolesnikov, Dirk Weissenborn, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Mostafa Dehghani, Matthias Minderer, Georg Heigold, Sylvain Gelly, et al. An image is worth 16x16 words: Transformers for image recognition at scale. ICLR , 2020. -
  13. [15][15] Thomas Elsken, Jan Hendrik Metzen, and Frank Hutter. Neural architecture search: A survey. JMLR , 20(1):1997-2017, 2019. -
  14. [16][16] Li Fei-Fei, Rob Fergus, and Pietro Perona. Learning generative visual models from few training examples: An incremental bayesian approach tested on 101 object categories. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop , 2004. -
  15. [17][17] Rosa L Figueroa, Qing Zeng-Treitler, Sasikiran Kandula, and Long H Ngo. Predicting sample size required for classification performance. BMC medical informatics and decision making , 12(1):1-10, 2012. -
  16. [18][18] Behrooz Ghorbani, Orhan Firat, Markus Freitag, Ankur Bapna, Maxim Krikun, Xavier Garcia, Ciprian Chelba, and Colin Cherry. Scaling laws for neural machine translation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.07740 , 2021. - · arXiv
  17. [19][19] Mitchell A Gordon, Kevin Duh, and Jared Kaplan. Data and parameter scaling laws for neural machine translation. In EMNLP , pages 5915-5922, 2021. -
  18. [20][20] Joel Hestness, Sharan Narang, Newsha Ardalani, Gregory Diamos, Heewoo Jun, Hassan Kianinejad, Md Patwary, Mostofa Ali, Yang Yang, and Yanqi Zhou. Deep learning scaling is predictable, empirically. arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.00409 , 2017. - · arXiv
  19. [21][21] Marcus Hutter. Learning curve theory. arXiv preprint arXiv:2102.04074 , 2021. - · arXiv
  20. [22][22] Mark Johnson, Peter Anderson, Mark Dras, and Mark Steedman. Predicting accuracy on large datasets from smaller pilot data. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics , pages 450-455, Melbourne, Australia, 2018. Association for Computational Linguistics. -
  21. [23][23] Jared Kaplan, Sam McCandlish, Tom Henighan, Tom B Brown, Benjamin Chess, Rewon Child, Scott Gray, Alec Radford, Jeffrey Wu, and Dario Amodei. Scaling laws for neural language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.08361 , 2020. - · arXiv
  22. [24][24] Diederik P Kingma and Jimmy Ba. Adam: A method for stochastic optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.6980 , 2014. - · arXiv
  23. [25][25] Aaron Klein, Stefan Falkner, Jost Tobias Springenberg, and Frank Hutter. Learning curve prediction with bayesian neural networks. In ICLR , 2017. -
  24. [26][26] Alexander Kolesnikov, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Joan Puigcerver, Jessica Yung, Sylvain Gelly, and Neil Houlsby. Big transfer (BiT): General visual representation learning. In ECCV , pages 491-507, 2020. -
  25. [28][28] Sayan Mukherjee, Pablo Tamayo, Simon Rogers, Ryan Rifkin, Anna Engle, Colin Campbell, Todd R Golub, and Jill P Mesirov. Estimating dataset size requirements for classifying dna microarray data. Journal of computational biology , 10(2):119-142, 2003. -
  26. [29][29] Preetum Nakkiran, Behnam Neyshabur, and Hanie Sedghi. The deep bootstrap framework: Good online learners are good offline generalizers. ICLR , 2020. -
  27. [30][30] Jonathan S Rosenfeld. Scaling laws for deep learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.07686 , 2021. - · arXiv
  28. [31][31] Jonathan S Rosenfeld, Amir Rosenfeld, Yonatan Belinkov, and Nir Shavit. A constructive prediction of the generalization error across scales. arXiv preprint arXiv:1909.12673 , 2019. - · arXiv
  29. [32][32] Utkarsh Sharma and Jared Kaplan. Scaling laws from the data manifold dimension. JMLR , 23(9):1-34, 2022. -
  30. [33][33] Noam Shazeer and Mitchell Stern. Adafactor: Adaptive learning rates with sublinear memory cost. In ICML , 2018. -
  31. [34][34] Chen Sun, Abhinav Shrivastava, Saurabh Singh, and Abhinav Gupta. Revisiting unreasonable effectiveness of data in deep learning era. In Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision , pages 843-852, 2017. -
  32. [35][35] Mingxing Tan and Quoc Le. Efficientnet: Rethinking model scaling for convolutional neural networks. In ICML , pages 6105-6114, 2019. -
  33. [36][36] Romal Thoppilan, Daniel De Freitas, Jamie Hall, Noam Shazeer, Apoorv Kulshreshtha, HengTze Cheng, Alicia Jin, Taylor Bos, Leslie Baker, Yu Du, et al. Lamda: Language models for dialog applications. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.08239 , 2022. - · arXiv
  34. [37][37] Ilya O Tolstikhin, Neil Houlsby, Alexander Kolesnikov, Lucas Beyer, Xiaohua Zhai, Thomas Unterthiner, Jessica Yung, Andreas Steiner, Daniel Keysers, Jakob Uszkoreit, et al. MLP-mixer: An all-MLP architecture for vision. NeurIPS , 34, 2021. -
  35. [39][39] Ross Wightman, Hugo Touvron, and Hervé Jégou. Resnet strikes back: An improved training procedure in timm. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.00476 , 2021. - · arXiv
  36. [40][40] X Zhai, A Kolesnikov, N Houlsby, and L Beyer. Scaling vision transformers. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.04560 , 2021. · arXiv

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Alabdulmohsin, I., Neyshabur, B., & Zhai, X.
Venue
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 35
Published
2022
Pages
22300-22312
ISSN
1049-5258 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W7133184166
Cited by
41
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 10 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 1
FWCI
4.29
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • neural information processing systems (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
neural scaling laws, language models, vision models, model size, performance scaling

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review