Scaling Smart: Accelerating Large Language Model Pre-training with Small Model Initialization

This paper was accepted at the Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP) Workshop at NeurIPS 2024.
The pre-training phase of language models often begins with randomly initialized parameters. With the current trends in scaling models, training their large number of parameters can be extremely slow and costly. In contrast, small language models are less expensive to train, but they often cannot achieve the accuracy of large models. In this paper, we explore an intriguing idea to connect these two different regimes: Can we develop a method to initialize large language models using…