Scaling Smart: Accelerating Large Language Model Pre-training with Small
  Model Initialization
Authors: name: Mohammad Samragh; name: Iman Mirzadeh; name: Keivan Alizadeh Vahid; name: Fartash Faghri; name: Minsik Cho; name: Moin Nabi; name: Devang Naik; name: Mehrdad Farajtabar
Published: 2024-09-19 16:50:26

Abstract: The pre-training phase of language models often begins with randomly
initialized parameters. With the current trends in scaling models, training
their large number of parameters can be extremely slow and costly. In contrast,
small language models are less expensive to train, but they often cannot
achieve the accuracy of large models. In this paper, we explore an intriguing
idea to connect these two different regimes: Can we develop a method to
initialize large language models using smaller pre-trained models? Will such
initialization bring any benefits in terms of training time and final accuracy?
In this paper, we introduce HyperCloning, a method that can expand the
parameters of a pre-trained language model to those of a larger model with
increased hidden dimensions. Our method ensures that the larger model retains
the functionality of the smaller model. As a result, the larger model already
inherits the predictive power and accuracy of the smaller model before the
training starts. We demonstrate that training such an initialized model results
in significant savings in terms of GPU hours required for pre-training large
language models.