Jan Małaśnicki

Jan Małaśnicki, Kamil Ciebiera, Mateusz Boruń et al.

Recent years have seen a growing interest and adoption of LLMs, with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) emerging as a leading architecture in extremely large models. Currently, the largest open-source models reach over $1$T parameters. At such scales, hyperparameter tuning becomes prohibitively expensive. Precisely for this reason, the $μ$Transfer is becoming a key technique. It allows for seamless transfer of optimal hyperparameters across model scales, resulting in a huge reduction in tuning costs. However, existing work has primarily focused on dense LLMs, leaving MoE architectures unexplored. In this work, we derive a $μ$-Parameterization for MoE, providing theoretical guarantees for feature learning across model widths. Our experiments demonstrate that the optimal learning rate reliably transfers across model sizes, establishing a foundation for efficient hyperparameter tuning in large-scale MoE models.

Jan Ludziejewski, Maciej Pióro, Jakub Krajewski et al.

Mixture of Experts (MoE) architectures have significantly increased computational efficiency in both research and real-world applications of large-scale machine learning models. However, their scalability and efficiency under memory constraints remain relatively underexplored. In this work, we present joint scaling laws for dense and MoE models, incorporating key factors such as the number of active parameters, dataset size, and the number of experts. Our findings provide a principled framework for selecting the optimal MoE configuration under fixed memory and compute budgets. Surprisingly, we show that MoE models can be more memory-efficient than dense models, contradicting conventional wisdom. To derive and validate the theoretical predictions of our scaling laws, we conduct over 280 experiments with up to 2.7B active parameters and up to 5B total parameters. These results offer actionable insights for designing and deploying MoE models in practical large-scale training scenarios.

Jan Ludziejewski, Jan Małaśnicki, Maciej Pióro et al.

In this work, we introduce a novel approach for optimizing LLM training by adjusting learning rates across weights of different components in Transformer models. Traditional methods often apply a uniform learning rate across all network layers, potentially overlooking the unique dynamics of each part. Remarkably, our introduced relative learning rates, RLRS, method accelerates the training process by up to $23\%$, particularly in complex models such as Mixture of Experts (MoE). Hyperparameters of RLRS can be efficiently tuned on smaller models and then effectively reused on models up to $27\times$ larger. This simple and effective method results in a substantial reduction in training time and computational resources, offering a practical and scalable solution for optimizing large-scale neural networks.

Maciej Stefaniak, Michał Krutul, Jan Małaśnicki et al.

Large language models have steadily increased in size to achieve improved performance; however, this growth has also led to greater inference time and computational demands. Consequently, there is rising interest in model size reduction methods. To address this issue, we propose Projected Compression, a novel model compression technique, that reduces model weights by utilizing projection modules. Specifically, we first train additional trainable projections weights and preserve access to all the original model parameters. Subsequently, these projections are merged into a lower-dimensional product matrix, resulting in a reduced-size standard Transformer-based model. Unlike alternative approaches that require additional computational overhead, our method matches the base model's per-token computation step in FLOPs. Experimental results show that Projected Compression outperforms the comparable hard pruning and retraining approach on higher quality models. Moreover, the performance margin scales well with the number of tokens.