Specialized Language Models with Cheap Inference from Limited Domain
  Data
Authors: name: David Grangier; name: Angelos Katharopoulos; name: Pierre Ablin; name: Awni Hannun
Published: 2024-02-02 01:45:18

Abstract: Large language models have emerged as a versatile tool but are challenging to
apply to tasks lacking large inference budgets and large in-domain training
sets. This work formalizes these constraints and distinguishes four important
variables: the pretraining budget (for training before the target domain is
known), the specialization budget (for training after the target domain is
known), the inference budget, and the in-domain training set size. Across these
settings, we compare different approaches from the machine learning literature.
Limited by inference cost, we find better alternatives to the standard practice
of training very large vanilla transformer models. In particular, we show that
hyper-networks and mixture of experts have better perplexity for large
pretraining budgets, while small models trained on importance sampled datasets
are attractive for large specialization budgets.