I did notice that having a large batch size and training slowly was important for me to get better results.
I've been reading up on batch size and people are all over the place. Some say smaller is better and some say larger is better. Mostly when it comes to gpt2 people say larger is better but there must come a point when increasing the batch size is no longer beneficial (or is it just that you use as large as your memory will allow)?
Seconding all of your questions! Details about successful 1.5B training is really hard to come by.
In case it’s helpful, here are some details of how a Chinese 1.5b GPT-2 was trained: https://github.com/imcaspar/gpt2-ml
It looks like they used a batch size of 2 on a TPUv3-256 pod. It took 50 hours and 99,000 training steps, which seems like about 1.3 examples per second.
Datasize: Around 30 MB, so around ~8000000 token? Can't remember exactly Learning Rate: was 1e-4, so I guess not that slow. I trained for around 1000 steps, but ended up liking the model from step 550. Which I think ended up at around 2 full passes through my data.
There probably is a point where increasing batch size is no longer helpful, my batch size was 32. When I had it lower I had issues with memorization/bias towards particular parts of the training data that it had most recently trained on.
Out of curiosity, what was the specific hardware you used? Some V100s, or maybe a DGX cluster?
Also, how many days did it take to get the loss down to acceptable levels? Did you aim for a loss of ~2.5, or less?
For now I'm trying to train it via 100 TPUv2-8's thanks to TFRC. Unfortunately, each TPUv2-8 is roughly 11x slower than a K80 GPU. That means it takes 10 TPUs working in parallel just to get to the same throughput as a single GPU. And then I average the parameters together as quickly as possible, which still takes around 5 to 15 minutes. (Training happens in parallel to all of that.)
It sort of seems to work, but it's hard to get the learning rate right. If it's set too high, various TPUs diverge. Too low and the loss stays constant.
But I imagine I'll crack it one of these days...