← 研踪 PaperTrailACL Anthology · ACL 2026:acl:2026.acl-long.1214 · 记录 #1
Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training
来源日期（仅到月份） 2026-07
来源记录日期 2026-07
雷达观测 2026-11-01 21:54
摘要
The GPT-4 technical report suggests that downstream performance can be predicted from pre-training signals, but offers little methodological detail on how to quantify this. This work address this gap by modeling knowledge retention, the capacity of a pre-trained language model to memorize factual information from its corpus, and introduce a principled method to estimate it prior to training. We propose Size-dependent Mutual Information (SMI), an information-theoretic predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering (QA) accuracy. SMI is validated through large-scale document retrieval over the disclosed pre-training corpora of 21 public and 3 custom models, combined with a robust multi-template QA evaluation. Experiments show that SMI significantly outperforms repetition-based baselines and achieves R² > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy for models above 1B parameters, without additional training. The analysis further reveals diminishing returns from scaling data and model size and provides evidence for an intrinsic upper bound on knowledge retention achievable by pre-training alone, motivating retrieval and other augmentation strategies.
论文发现出处
这些页面提供论文线索，不代表同行评审或质量认证。
观测到的版本
平台记录号代表本站观测到的元数据变化，不是作者修订号。来源日期仅到月份或年份时，按该月或该年首日存档。
记录 #1 · 2026-07 · 最新观测版本
Beyond Scaling: Measuring and Predicting the Upper Bound of Knowledge Retention in Language Model Pre-Training
The GPT-4 technical report suggests that downstream performance can be predicted from pre-training signals, but offers little methodological detail on how to quantify this. This work address this gap by modeling knowledge retention, the capacity of a pre-trained language model to memorize factual information from its corpus, and introduce a principled method to estimate it prior to training. We propose Size-dependent Mutual Information (SMI), an information-theoretic predictor that integrates knowledge frequency, knowledge specificity, and model size to forecast closed-book question answering (QA) accuracy. SMI is validated through large-scale document retrieval over the disclosed pre-training corpora of 21 public and 3 custom models, combined with a robust multi-template QA evaluation. Experiments show that SMI significantly outperforms repetition-based baselines and achieves R² > 0.7 in predicting QA accuracy for models above 1B parameters, without additional training. The analysis further reveals diminishing returns from scaling data and model size and provides evidence for an intrinsic upper bound on knowledge retention achievable by pre-training alone, motivating retrieval and other augmentation strategies.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗