Farseer: A Refined Scaling Law in Large Language Models

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) is prohibitively expensive, creating a critical scaling gap where insights from small-scale experiments often fail to transfer to resource-intensive production systems, thereby hindering efficient innovation. To bridge this, we introduce Farseer, a novel and refined scaling law offering enhanced predictive accuracy across scales. By systematically constructing a model loss surface $L(N,D)$, Farseer achieves a significantly better fit to empirical data than prior laws (e.g., Chinchilla's law). Our methodology yields accurate, robust, and highly generalizable predictions, demonstrating excellent extrapolation capabilities, improving upon Chinchilla's law by reducing extrapolation error by 433\%. This allows for the reliable evaluation of competing training strategies across all $(N,D)$ settings, enabling conclusions from small-scale ablation studies to be confidently extrapolated to predict large-scale performance. Furthermore, Farseer provides new insights into optimal compute allocation, better reflecting the nuanced demands of modern LLM training. To validate our approach, we trained an extensive suite of approximately 1,000 LLMs across diverse scales and configurations, consuming roughly 3 million NVIDIA H100 GPU hours. We are comprehensively open-sourcing all models, data, results, and logs at https://github.com/Farseer-Scaling-Law/Farseer to foster further research.

Success is in the Details: Evaluate and Enhance Details Sensitivity of Code LLMs through Counterfactuals

Code Sensitivity refers to the ability of Code LLMs to recognize and respond to details changes in problem descriptions. While current code benchmarks and instruction data focus on difficulty and diversity, sensitivity is overlooked. We first introduce the CTF-Code benchmark, constructed using counterfactual perturbations, minimizing input changes while maximizing output changes. The evaluation shows that many LLMs have a more than 10\% performance drop compared to the original problems. To fully utilize sensitivity, CTF-Instruct, an incremental instruction fine-tuning framework, extends on existing data and uses a selection mechanism to meet the three dimensions of difficulty, diversity, and sensitivity. Experiments show that LLMs fine-tuned with CTF-Instruct data achieve over a 2\% improvement on CTF-Code, and more than a 10\% performance boost on LiveCodeBench, validating the feasibility of enhancing LLMs' sensitivity to improve performance.

Is Compression Really Linear with Code Intelligence?

Understanding the relationship between data compression and the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial, especially in specialized domains like code intelligence. Prior work posited a linear relationship between compression and general intelligence. However, it overlooked the multifaceted nature of code that encompasses diverse programming languages and tasks, and struggled with fair evaluation of modern Code LLMs. We address this by evaluating a diverse array of open-source Code LLMs on comprehensive multi-language, multi-task code benchmarks. To address the challenge of efficient and fair evaluation of pre-trained LLMs' code intelligence, we introduce \textit{Format Annealing}, a lightweight, transparent training methodology designed to assess the intrinsic capabilities of these pre-trained models equitably. Compression efficacy, measured as bits-per-character (BPC), is determined using a novel, large-scale, and previously unseen code validation set derived from GitHub. Our empirical results reveal a fundamental logarithmic relationship between measured code intelligence and BPC. This finding refines prior hypotheses of linearity, which we suggest are likely observations of the logarithmic curve's tail under specific, limited conditions. Our work provides a more nuanced understanding of compression's role in developing code intelligence and contributes a robust evaluation framework in the code domain.