No abstract

Pretrained general-purpose language models can achieve state-of-the-art accuracies in various natural language processing domains by adapting to downstream tasks via zero-shot, few-shot and finetuning techniques. Because of their success, the size of these models has increased rapidly, requiring high-performance hardware, software, and algorithmic techniques to enable training such large models. As the result of a joint effort between Microsoft and NVIDIA, we present details on the training of the largest monolithic transformer based language model, Megatron-Turing NLG 530B (MT-NLG), with 530 billion parameters. In this paper, we first focus on the infrastructure as well as the 3D parallelism methodology used to train this model using DeepSpeed and Megatron. Next, we detail the training process, the design of our training corpus, and our data curation techniques, which we believe is a key ingredient to the success of the model. Finally, we discuss various evaluation results, as well as other interesting observations and new properties exhibited by MT-NLG. We demonstrate that MT-NLG achieves superior zero-, one-, and few-shot learning accuracies on several NLP benchmarks and establishes new state-of-the-art results. We believe that our contributions will help further the development of large-scale training infrastructures, large-scale language models, and natural language generations.

Question and answer generation is a data augmentation method that aims to improve question answering (QA) models given the limited amount of human labeled data. However, a considerable gap remains between synthetic and human-generated question-answer pairs. This work aims to narrow this gap by taking advantage of large language models and explores several factors such as model size, quality of pretrained models, scale of data synthesized, and algorithmic choices. On the SQUAD1.1 question answering task, we achieve higher accuracy using solely synthetic questions and answers than when using the SQUAD1.1 training set questions alone. Removing access to real Wikipedia data, we synthesize questions and answers from a synthetic text corpus generated by an 8.3 billion parameter GPT-2 model and achieve 88.4 Exact Match (EM) and 93.9 F1 score on the SQUAD1.1 dev set. We further apply our methodology to SQUAD2.0 and show a 2.8 absolute gain on EM score compared to prior work using synthetic data.

There has been an influx of biomedical domain-specific language models, showing language models pre-trained on biomedical text perform better on biomedical domain benchmarks than those trained on general domain text corpora such as Wikipedia and Books. Yet, most works do not study the factors affecting each domain language application deeply. Additionally, the study of model size on domain-specific models has been mostly missing. We empirically study and evaluate several factors that can affect performance on domain language applications, such as the sub-word vocabulary set, model size, pre-training corpus, and domain transfer. We show consistent improvements on benchmarks with our larger BioMegatron model trained on a larger domain corpus, contributing to our understanding of domain language model applications. We demonstrate noticeable improvements over the previous state-ofthe-art (SOTA) on standard biomedical NLP benchmarks of question answering, named entity recognition, and relation extraction. Code and checkpoints to reproduce our experiments are available at github.com/NVIDIA/NeMo.

Large language models have led to state-of-the-art accuracies across a range of tasks. However, training these large models efficiently is challenging for two reasons: a) GPU memory capacity is limited, making it impossible to fit large models on a single GPU or even on a multi-GPU server; and b) the number of compute operations required to train these models can result in unrealistically long training times. New methods of model parallelism such as tensor and pipeline parallelism have been proposed to address these challenges; unfortunately, naive usage leads to fundamental scaling issues at thousands of GPUs due to various reasons, e.g., expensive cross-node communication or idle periods waiting on other devices.In this work, we show how to compose different types of parallelism methods (tensor, pipeline, and data paralleism) to scale to thousands of GPUs, achieving a two-order-of-magnitude increase in the sizes of models we can efficiently train compared to existing systems. We discuss various implementations of pipeline parallelism and propose a novel schedule that can improve throughput by more than 10% with comparable memory footprint compared to previously-proposed approaches. We quantitatively study the trade-offs between tensor, pipeline, and data parallelism, and provide intuition as to how to configure distributed training of a large model. The composition of these techniques allows us to perform training iterations on a model with 1 trillion parameters at 502 petaFLOP/s on 3072 GPUs with achieved per-GPU throughput of 52% of peak; previous efforts to train similar-sized models achieve much lower throughput (36% of theoretical peak). Our code has been open-sourced at https://github.com/nvidia/megatron-lm.