2021/04/26 by Wei Zeng, Zeng, Wei, Xiaozhe Ren +72 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2104.12369
openalex publication_date 2021/04/26 · openalex created_date 2021/05/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Large-scale Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have become the new paradigm for Natural Language Processing (NLP). PLMs with hundreds of billions parameters such as GPT-3 have demonstrated strong performances on natural language understanding and generation with few-shot in-context learning. In this work, we present our practice on training large-scale autoregressive language models named PanGu-α, with up to 200 billion parameters. PanGu-α is developed under the MindSpore and trained on a cluster of 2048 Ascend 910 AI processors. The training parallelism strategy is implemented based on MindSpore Auto-parallel, which composes five parallelism dimensions to scale the training task to 2048 processors efficiently, including data parallelism, op-level model parallelism, pipeline model parallelism, optimizer model parallelism and rematerialization. To enhance the generalization ability of PanGu-α, we collect 1.1TB high-quality Chinese data from a wide range of domains to pretrain the model. We empirically test the generation ability of PanGu-α in various scenarios including text summarization, question answering, dialogue generation, etc. Moreover, we investigate the effect of model scales on the few-shot performances across a broad range of Chinese NLP tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superior capabilities of PanGu-α in performing various tasks under few-shot or zero-shot settings.