Advantageous Parameter Expansion Training Makes Better Large Language Models

Abstract

Although scaling up the number of trainable parameters can effectively improve the training performance of large language models, it also leads to increased computational overhead. When delving into the parameter difference, we find that a subset of parameters, termed advantageous parameters, plays a crucial role in determining model performance. Further analysis reveals that stronger models tend to possess more such parameters. In this paper, we propose Advantageous Parameter EXpansion Training (APEX), a method that progressively expands advantageous parameters into the space of disadvantageous ones, thereby increasing their proportion and enhancing training effectiveness, while keeping the total parameter count unchanged. Extensive experiments on both instruction tuning and continued pre-training across five base models demonstrate that, in instruction tuning, APEX outperforms full-parameter tuning while using only 52% of the trainable parameters. In continued pre-training, APEX achieves the same perplexity level as conventional training with only approximately 30% of the training data, and yields significant improvements on downstream tasks.