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arXiv · 2601.19831

Neural Neural Scaling Laws

Michael Y. Hu·Jane Pan·Ayush Rajesh Jhaveri·Nicholas Lourie·Kyunghyun Cho
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Abstract

Neural scaling laws predict how language model performance improves with increased training inputs. While aggregate metrics like validation loss can follow smooth power-law curves, individual downstream tasks exhibit diverse scaling behaviors: some improve monotonically, others plateau, and some even degrade with scale. We argue that predicting downstream performance from validation loss suffers from two limitations: averaging token-level losses obscures signal, and no simple parametric family can capture the full spectrum of scaling behaviors. To address this, we propose Neural Neural Scaling Laws (NeuNeu), a neural network that frames scaling law prediction as time-series extrapolation. NeuNeu combines temporal context from observed accuracy trajectories with token-level validation losses, learning to predict future performance without the limitations inherent in assuming a specific functional form. Trained entirely on open-source model checkpoints from HuggingFace, NeuNeu achieves 1.99% mean absolute error in predicting model accuracy on 66 downstream tasks -- a 44% reduction compared to logistic scaling laws (3.56% MAE). Furthermore, NeuNeu generalizes zero-shot to unseen model families, architectures, parameter counts, and downstream tasks. Our work suggests that predicting downstream scaling directly from data outperforms parametric alternatives.

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Michael Y. Hu, Jane Pan, Ayush Rajesh Jhaveri, Nicholas Lourie, Kyunghyun Cho. 2026-05-07. Neural Neural Scaling Laws. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19831

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