Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely adopted in a wide range of tasks, leading to increasing attention towards the research on how scaling LLMs affects their performance. Existing works, termed as Scaling Laws, have discovered that the loss of LLMs scales as power laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size. However, the performance of LLMs throughout the training process remains untouched. In this paper, we propose the novel concept of Temporal Scaling Law and study the loss of LLMs from the temporal dimension. We first investigate the imbalance of loss on each token positions and develop a reciprocal-law across model scales and training stages. We then derive the temporal scaling law by studying the temporal patterns of the reciprocal-law parameters. Results on both in-distribution (IID) data and out-of-distribution (OOD) data demonstrate that our temporal scaling law accurately predicts the performance of LLMs in future training stages. Moreover, the temporal scaling law reveals that LLMs learn uniformly on different token positions, despite the loss imbalance. Experiments on pre-training LLMs in various scales show that this phenomenon verifies the default training paradigm for generative language models, in which no re-weighting strategies are attached during training. Overall, the temporal scaling law provides deeper insight into LLM pre-training.

最近，大型语言模型广泛应用于各种任务，对于如何扩展语言模型对其性能的影响的研究引起了越来越多的关注。本文提出了新概念的时间缩放定律，并研究了语言模型在时间维度上的损失。研究发现，尽管存在损失不平衡，语言模型在不同的令牌位置上学习是均匀的。通过在各种规模的预训练语言模型上进行的实验验证了这一现象，并提供了对预训练语言模型更深入的理解。

大型语言模型的时间尺度定律