Parallel Scaling Law for Language Model

Yet Another Scaling Law beyond Parameters and Inference Time Scaling

💡&nbsp;<a href="#-key-findings">Key Findings</a>
| 📈&nbsp;<a href="#-scaling-law">Scaling Law</a>
| ⚡&nbsp;<a href="#-cost-analysis">Cost Analysis</a>
| 🔥&nbsp;<a href="#-models">Models</a>
| 📚&nbsp;<a href="#-citation">Citation</a>

🌟 About

• Most believe that scaling language models requires a heavy cost in either space (parameter scaling) or time (inference-time scaling).
• We introduce the third scaling paradigm for scaling LLMs: leverages parallel computation during both training and inference time (Parallel Scaling, or ParScale).
• We apply $P$ diverse and learnable transformations to the input, execute forward passes of the model in parallel, and dynamically aggregate the $P$ outputs.

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💡 Key Findings

Here are the core insights and benefits distilled from our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations:

📈 Logarithmic Scaling Law: We theoretically and empirically establish that scaling with $P$ parallel streams is comparable to scaling the number of parameters by $O(\log P)$. This suggests that parallel computation can serve as an efficient substitute for parameter growth, especially for larger models.

✅ Universal Applicability: Unlike inference-time scaling which requires specialized data and limited application, it works with any model architecture, optimization method, data, or downstream task.

🧠 Stronger Performance on Reasoning Tasks: Reasoning-intensive tasks (e.g., coding or math) benefit more from ParScale, which suggests that scaling computation can effectively push the boundary of reasoning.

⚡ Superior Inference Efficiency: ParScale can use up to 22x less memory increase and 6x less latency increase compared to parameter scaling that achieves the same performance improvement (batch size=1).

🧱 Cost-Efficient Training via Two-Stage Strategy: Training a parallel-scaled model doesn't require starting from scratch. With a two-stage training strategy, we can post-train ithe parallel components using only a small amount of data.

🔁 Dynamic Adaptation at Inference Time: We find that ParScale remains effective with frozen main parameters for different $P$. This illustrates the potential of dynamic parallel scaling: switching $P$ to dynamically adapt model capabilities during inference.

We release the inference code in modeling_qwen2_parscale.py and configuration_qwen2_parscale.py. Our 67 checkpoints is available at 🤗 HuggingFace.

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📈 Scaling Law

• We carry out large-scale pre-training experiments on the Stack-V2 and Pile corpus, by ranging $P$ from 1 to 8 and model parameters from 500M to 4.4B.
• We use the results to fit a new parallel scaling law that generalizes the Chinchilla scaling law.
• We release our parametric fitting code in parametric_fit.py.
• Feel free to try 🤗 HuggingFace Space for a nice visualization for the parallel scaling law!

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⚡ Cost Analysis

• We further compare the inference efficiency between parallel scaling and parameter scaling at equivalent performance levels.
• We release our analysis code in cost_analysis.py. Before using it, you should first install llm-analysis:

git clone https://github.com/cli99/llm-analysis.git
cd llm-analysis
pip install .

• You can use the following command to analyze the inference memory and latency cost for our 4.4B model, with $P=2$ and batch size=2:

python cost_analysis.py --hidden_size 2560 --intermediate_size 13824 --P 2 --batch_size 2

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🔥 Models

✨ are our recommendation for strong models!

Base models for scaling training data to 1T tokens

These models demonstrate strong competitiveness among existing small models, including SmolLM, gemma, and Llama-3.2.

Model	Description	Download
ParScale-1.8B-P1	✨ Baseline $P=1$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P1
ParScale-1.8B-P2	✨ ParScale $P=2$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P2
ParScale-1.8B-P4	✨ ParScale $P=4$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P4
ParScale-1.8B-P8	✨ ParScale $P=8$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P8

Instruct models for scaling training data to 1T tokens

We post-trained the aforementioned base model on SmolTalk-1M to enable conversational capabilities.

Model	Description	Download
ParScale-1.8B-P1-Inst	✨ Baseline $P=1$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P1-Inst
ParScale-1.8B-P2-Inst	✨ ParScale $P=2$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P2-Inst
ParScale-1.8B-P4-Inst	✨ ParScale $P=4$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P4-Inst
ParScale-1.8B-P8-Inst	✨ ParScale $P=8$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P8-Inst

Continual Pretraining Qwen-2.5-3B

We froze the parameters of Qwen-2.5-3B and only fine-tuned the newly introduced parameters on Stack-V2-Python. Since the following models share the same backbone parameters as Qwen-2.5-3B, they have the potential for dynamic ParScale: switching P to adapt model capabilities during inference.

Model	Description	Download
ParScale-Qwen-3B-P2-Python	✨ ParScale $P=2$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-Qwen-3B-P2-Python
ParScale-Qwen-3B-P4-Python	✨ ParScale $P=4$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-Qwen-3B-P4-Python
ParScale-Qwen-3B-P8-Python	✨ ParScale $P=8$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-Qwen-3B-P8-Python

• For full continual pretraining on Stack-V2-Python

Model	Description	Download
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P1-Python	Baseline $P=1$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P1-Python
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P2-Python	ParScale $P=2$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P2-Python
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P4-Python	ParScale $P=4$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P4-Python
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P8-Python	ParScale $P=8$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P8-Python

• For full continual pretraining on Pile

Model	Description	Download
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P1-Pile	Baseline $P=1$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P1-Pile
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P2-Pile	ParScale $P=2$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P2-Pile
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P4-Pile	ParScale $P=4$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P4-Pile
ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P8-Pile	ParScale $P=8$	🤗 ParScale/ParScale-QwenInit-3B-P8-Pile

Checkpoints Used to Fit the Scaling Law

Download link: https://huggingface.co/ParScale/ParScale-{size}-{P}-{dataset}

• {size}: model size, from {0.7B, 0.9B, 1.3B, 1.8B, 3B, 4.7B}
• {P}: number of parallels, from {P1, P2, P4, P8}
• {dataset}: training dataset, from {Python, Pile}
• $6\times 4 \times 2=48$ checkpoints in total.

Usage Example with 🤗 Hugging Face

from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
name = "ParScale/ParScale-1.8B-P8" # or anything else you like
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(name, trust_remote_code=True).to("cuda")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(name)
inputs = tokenizer.encode("Hello, how are you today?", return_tensors="pt").to("cuda")
outputs = model.generate(inputs, max_new_tokens=128)[0]
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs))

📚 Citation

@article{ParScale,
      title={Parallel Scaling Law for Language Models}, 
      author={Mouxiang Chen and Binyuan Hui and Zeyu Cui and Jiaxi Yang and Dayiheng Liu and Jianling Sun and Junyang Lin and Zhongxin Liu},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2505.10475},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.10475},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10475}, 
}