Papers › An Analysis of Neural Language Modeling at Multiple Scales
An Analysis of Neural Language Modeling at Multiple Scales
Stephen Merity, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Richard Socher
Many of the leading approaches in language modeling introduce novel, complex and specialized architectures. We take existing state-of-the-art word level language models based on LSTMs and QRNNs and extend them to both larger vocabularies as well as character-level granularity. When properly tuned, LSTMs and QRNNs achieve state-of-the-art results on character-level (Penn Treebank, enwik8) and word-level (WikiText-103) datasets, respectively. Results are obtained in only 12 hours (WikiText-103) to 2 days (enwik8) using a single modern GPU.
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Code
Syntology Ran 3 of 18 code samples harvested from 5 repositories linked to this paper; 15 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · our draft was wrong.
By repository: community (archive-listed): 18 samples from 5 repositories, 3 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
18 samples harvested; 3 ran; 2 honoured the contract we drafted; 15 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
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Tasks
1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Language Modelling | Hutter Prize | 3-layer AWD-LSTM | Bit per Character (BPC) | 1.232 | #13 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Hutter Prize | 3-layer AWD-LSTM | Number of params | 47M | #13 of 18 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Character Level) | 3-layer AWD-LSTM | Bit per Character (BPC) | 1.175 | #7 of 20 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Character Level) | 3-layer AWD-LSTM | Number of params | 13.8M | #7 of 20 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Character Level) | 6-layer QRNN | Bit per Character (BPC) | 1.187 | #9 of 20 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | Penn Treebank (Character Level) | 6-layer QRNN | Number of params | 13.8M | #9 of 20 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-103 | 4 layer QRNN | Number of params | 151M | #75 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-103 | 4 layer QRNN | Test perplexity | 33.0 | #75 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | WikiText-103 | 4 layer QRNN | Validation perplexity | 32.0 | #75 of 89 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | enwik8 | AWD-LSTM (3 layers) | Bit per Character (BPC) | 1.232 | #33 of 42 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Language Modelling | enwik8 | AWD-LSTM (3 layers) | Number of params | 47M | #33 of 42 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
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