Scaling Laws for Deep Learning

Running faster will only get you so far — it is generally advisable to first understand where the roads lead, then get a car ... The renaissance of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) over the last decade is accompanied by an unscalable computational cost, limiting its advancement and we...

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Main Author: Rosenfeld, Jonathan S.
Other Authors: Shavit, Nir
Format: Thesis
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139897
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author Rosenfeld, Jonathan S.
author2 Shavit, Nir
author_facet Shavit, Nir
Rosenfeld, Jonathan S.
author_sort Rosenfeld, Jonathan S.
collection MIT
description Running faster will only get you so far — it is generally advisable to first understand where the roads lead, then get a car ... The renaissance of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) over the last decade is accompanied by an unscalable computational cost, limiting its advancement and weighing on the field in practice. In this thesis we take a systematic approach to address the algorithmic and methodological limitations at the root of these costs. We first demonstrate that DL training and pruning are predictable and governed by scaling laws — for state of the art models and tasks, spanning image classification and language modeling, as well as for state of the art model compression via iterative pruning. Predictability, via the establishment of these scaling laws, provides the path for principled design and trade-off reasoning, currently largely lacking in the field. We then continue to analyze the sources of the scaling laws, offering an approximation-theoretic view and showing through the exploration of a noiseless realizable case that DL is in fact dominated by error sources very far from the lower error limit. We conclude by building on the gained theoretical understanding of the scaling laws’ origins. We present a conjectural path to eliminate one of the current dominant error sources — through a data bandwidth limiting hypothesis and the introduction of Nyquist learners — which can, in principle, reach the generalization error lower limit (e.g. 0 in the noiseless case), at finite dataset size.
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spelling mit-1721.1/1398972022-02-08T03:17:50Z Scaling Laws for Deep Learning Rosenfeld, Jonathan S. Shavit, Nir Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Running faster will only get you so far — it is generally advisable to first understand where the roads lead, then get a car ... The renaissance of machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) over the last decade is accompanied by an unscalable computational cost, limiting its advancement and weighing on the field in practice. In this thesis we take a systematic approach to address the algorithmic and methodological limitations at the root of these costs. We first demonstrate that DL training and pruning are predictable and governed by scaling laws — for state of the art models and tasks, spanning image classification and language modeling, as well as for state of the art model compression via iterative pruning. Predictability, via the establishment of these scaling laws, provides the path for principled design and trade-off reasoning, currently largely lacking in the field. We then continue to analyze the sources of the scaling laws, offering an approximation-theoretic view and showing through the exploration of a noiseless realizable case that DL is in fact dominated by error sources very far from the lower error limit. We conclude by building on the gained theoretical understanding of the scaling laws’ origins. We present a conjectural path to eliminate one of the current dominant error sources — through a data bandwidth limiting hypothesis and the introduction of Nyquist learners — which can, in principle, reach the generalization error lower limit (e.g. 0 in the noiseless case), at finite dataset size. Ph.D. 2022-02-07T15:11:26Z 2022-02-07T15:11:26Z 2021-09 2021-09-21T19:31:02.813Z Thesis https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139897 In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted Copyright MIT http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/ application/pdf Massachusetts Institute of Technology
spellingShingle Rosenfeld, Jonathan S.
Scaling Laws for Deep Learning
title Scaling Laws for Deep Learning
title_full Scaling Laws for Deep Learning
title_fullStr Scaling Laws for Deep Learning
title_full_unstemmed Scaling Laws for Deep Learning
title_short Scaling Laws for Deep Learning
title_sort scaling laws for deep learning
url https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/139897
work_keys_str_mv AT rosenfeldjonathans scalinglawsfordeeplearning