Scaling Laws for Code: A More Data-Hungry Regime
Xianzhen Luo Harbin Institute of Techology, Wenzhen Zheng, Qingfu Zhu Harbin Institute of Technology, Rongyi Zhang, Houyi Li Fudan University, Siming Huang, YuanTao Fan, Wanxiang Che Harbin Institute of Technology
Code Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing software engineering. However, scaling laws that guide the efficient training are predominantly analyzed on Natural Language (NL). Given the fundamental differences like strict syntax between code and NL, it is unclear whether these laws are directly applicable to code. To address this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study of scaling laws for code, comprising 117 experimental runs with model sizes from 0.2B to 3.8B and training tokens from 2B to 128B. We fit the Chinchilla law and the Farsser law. First, the results show that the more expressive Farseer law offers greater accuracy. Second, the analysis reveals that Code LLMs scale effectively with model size. Crucially, code represents a more data-hungry regime, requiring a substantially higher data-to-parameter ratio than NL. Finally, two additional sets of experiments on code-NL mixtures show that NL benefits resource-constrained scenarios, but becomes a detriment at higher compute budgets.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表