The interest in linear complexity models for large language models is on the rise, although their scaling capacity remains uncertain. In this study, we present the scaling laws for linear complexity language models to establish a foundation for their scalability. Specifically, we examine the scaling behaviors of three efficient linear architectures. These include TNL, a linear attention model with data-independent decay; HGRN2, a linear RNN with data-dependent decay; and cosFormer2, a linear attention model without decay. We also include LLaMA as a baseline architecture for softmax attention for comparison. These models were trained with six variants, ranging from 70M to 7B parameters on a 300B-token corpus, and evaluated with a total of 1,376 intermediate checkpoints on various downstream tasks. These tasks include validation loss, commonsense reasoning, and information retrieval and generation. The study reveals that existing linear complexity language models exhibit similar scaling capabilities as conventional transformer-based models while also demonstrating superior linguistic proficiency and knowledge retention.

本研究通过研究线性复杂度语言模型的扩展性建立了基础，并对三种高效的线性架构进行了扩展行为的分析。结果显示，现有的线性复杂度语言模型在扩展能力、语言熟练度和知识保留方面与传统基于transformer的模型相似。

线性复杂度语言模型的尺度定律