PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
Abstract
Large language models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language tasks using few-shot learning, which drastically reduces the number of task-specific training examples needed to adapt the model to a particular application. To further our understanding of the impact of scale on few-shot learning, we trained a 540-billion parameter, densely activated, Transformer language model, which we call Pathways Language Model PaLM. We trained PaLM on 6144 TPU v4 chips using Pathways, a new ML system which enables highly efficient training across multiple TPU Pods. We demonstrate continued benefits of scaling by achieving state-of-the-art few-shot learning results on hundreds of language understanding and generation benchmarks. On a number of these tasks, PaLM 540B achieves breakthrough performance, outperforming the finetuned state-of-the-art on a suite of multi-step reasoning tasks, and outperforming average human performance on the recently released BIG-bench benchmark. A significant number of BIG-bench tasks showed discontinuous improvements from model scale, meaning that performance steeply increased as we scaled to our largest model. PaLM also has strong capabilities in multilingual tasks and source code generation, which we demonstrate on a wide array of benchmarks. We additionally provide a comprehensive analysis on bias and toxicity, and study the extent of training data memorization with respect to model scale. Finally, we discuss the ethical considerations related to large language models and discuss potential mitigation strategies.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2204.02311,
title = {PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways},
author = {Aakanksha Chowdhery and Sharan Narang and Jacob Devlin and Maarten Bosma and Gaurav Mishra and Adam Roberts and Paul Barham and Hyung Won Chung and Charles Sutton and Sebastian Gehrmann and Parker Schuh and Kensen Shi and Sasha Tsvyashchenko and Joshua Maynez and Abhishek Rao and Parker Barnes and Yi Tay and Noam Shazeer and Vinodkumar Prabhakaran and Emily Reif and Nan Du and Ben Hutchinson and Reiner Pope and James Bradbury and Jacob Austin and Michael Isard and Guy Gur-Ari and Pengcheng Yin and Toju Duke and Anselm Levskaya and Sanjay Ghemawat and Sunipa Dev and Henryk Michalewski and Xavier Garcia and Vedant Misra and Kevin Robinson and Liam Fedus and Denny Zhou and Daphne Ippolito and David Luan and Hyeontaek Lim and Barret Zoph and Alexander Spiridonov and Ryan Sepassi and David Dohan and Shivani Agrawal and Mark Omernick and Andrew M. Dai and Thanumalayan Sankaranarayana Pillai and Marie Pellat and Aitor Lewkowycz and Erica Moreira and Rewon Child and Oleksandr Polozov and Katherine Lee and Zongwei Zhou and Xuezhi Wang and Brennan Saeta and Mark Diaz and Orhan Firat and Michele Catasta and Jason Wei and Kathy Meier-Hellstern and Douglas Eck and Jeff Dean and Slav Petrov and Noah Fiedel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02311},
year = {2022}
}