Papers › GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

GLaM: Efficient Scaling of Language Models with Mixture-of-Experts

13 Dec 2021arXiv:2112.06905archive 2025-07-28

Nan Du, Yanping Huang, Andrew M. Dai, Simon Tong, Dmitry Lepikhin, Yuanzhong Xu, Maxim Krikun, Yanqi Zhou, Adams Wei Yu, Orhan Firat, Barret Zoph, Liam Fedus, Maarten Bosma, Zongwei Zhou, Tao Wang, Yu Emma Wang, Kellie Webster, Marie Pellat, Kevin Robinson, Kathleen Meier-Hellstern, Toju Duke, Lucas Dixon, Kun Zhang, Quoc V Le, Yonghui Wu, Zhifeng Chen, Claire Cui

Scaling language models with more data, compute and parameters has driven significant progress in natural language processing. For example, thanks to scaling, GPT-3 was able to achieve strong results on in-context learning tasks. However, training these large dense models requires significant amounts of computing resources. In this paper, we propose and develop a family of language models named GLaM (Generalist Language Model), which uses a sparsely activated mixture-of-experts architecture to scale the model capacity while also incurring substantially less training cost compared to dense variants. The largest GLaM has 1.2 trillion parameters, which is approximately 7x larger than GPT-3. It consumes only 1/3 of the energy used to train GPT-3 and requires half of the computation flops for inference, while still achieving better overall zero-shot and one-shot performance across 29 NLP tasks.

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Tasks

Common Sense ReasoningIn-Context LearningLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingMixture-of-ExpertsQuestion Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) GLaM 64B/64E (0 shot) Accuracy 50.3 #36 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) GLaM 64B/64E (1 shot) Accuracy 48.2 #39 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) GLaM (64B/64E) (5-shot) Accuracy 74.8 #24 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Easy) GLaM 64B/64E (0-shot) Accuracy 68.0 #40 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling LAMBADA GLaM 62B/64E (One-Shot) Accuracy 80.9 #10 of 37 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering Natural Questions GLaM 62B/64E (Few-Shot) EM 32.5 #32 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering Natural Questions GLaM 62B/64E (One-Shot) EM 26.3 #39 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering Natural Questions GLaM 62B/64E (Zero-Shot) EM 24.7 #43 of 47 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering TriviaQA GLaM 62B/64E (One-shot) EM 75.8 #19 of 56 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering TriviaQA GLaM 62B/64E (Few-shot) EM 75.8 #20 of 56 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering TriviaQA GLaM 62B/64E (Zero-shot) EM 71.3 #30 of 56 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering WebQuestions GLaM 62B/64E (Zero-Shot) EM 15.5 #32 of 37 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.

Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBPECosine AnnealingDense ConnectionsDropoutGPT-3Layer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Cosine AnnealingMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight Decay

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