Navigating Scaling Laws: Compute Optimality in Adaptive Model Training

In recent years, the state-of-the-art in deep learning has been dominated by very large models that have been pre-trained on vast amounts of data. The paradigm is very simple: investing more computational resources (optimally) leads to better performance, and even predictably so; neural scaling laws have been derived that accurately forecast the performance of a network for a desired level of compute. This leads to the notion of a 'compute-optimal' model, i.e. a model that allocates a given level of compute during training optimally to maximize performance. In this work, we extend the concept of optimality by allowing for an 'adaptive' model, i.e. a model that can change its shape during training. By doing so, we can design adaptive models that optimally traverse between the underlying scaling laws and outpace their `static' counterparts, leading to a significant reduction in the required compute to reach a given target performance. We show that our approach generalizes across modalities and different shape parameters.