Although scaling language models improves performance on a range of tasks, there are apparently some scenarios where scaling hurts performance. For instance, the Inverse Scaling Prize Round 1 identified four ''inverse scaling'' tasks, for which performance gets worse for larger models. These tasks were evaluated on models of up to 280B parameters, trained up to 500 zettaFLOPs of compute. This paper takes a closer look at these four tasks. We evaluate models of up to 540B parameters, trained on five times more compute than those evaluated in the Inverse Scaling Prize. With this increased range of model sizes and training compute, three out of the four tasks exhibit what we call ''U-shaped scaling'' -- performance decreases up to a certain model size, and then increases again up to the largest model evaluated. One hypothesis is that U-shaped scaling occurs when a task comprises a ''true task'' and a ''distractor task''. Medium-size models can do the distractor task, which hurts performance, while only large-enough models can ignore the distractor task and do the true task. The existence of U-shaped scaling implies that inverse scaling may not hold for larger models. Second, we evaluate the inverse scaling tasks using chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, in addition to basic prompting without CoT. With CoT prompting, all four tasks show either U-shaped scaling or positive scaling, achieving perfect solve rates on two tasks and several sub-tasks. This suggests that the term "inverse scaling task" is under-specified -- a given task may be inverse scaling for one prompt but positive or U-shaped scaling for a different prompt.

本文研究了逆比例缩放任务，发现多数任务的表现呈现“U型缩放”，即随着模型大小的增加，性能先下降后上升，只有四个任务呈现逆比例缩放。研究表明，对于大型模型而言，先前观察到的精度下降趋势可能无法继续保持，并进一步支持大型模型会释放新的能力的主张。

反比例缩放可能呈U形