[Megatron](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.08053.pdf) is a large, powerful transformer developed by the Applied Deep Learning Research team at NVIDIA. This repository is for ongoing research on training large transformer language models at scale. We developed efficient, model-parallel, and multinode training of [GPT-2](https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf) and [BERT](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805.pdf) using mixed precision.
Using our GPT-2 model we achieve a perplexity of 10.8 on the WikiText-103 dataset (improving SOTA from 15.8) and an accuracy of 66.5% on the LAMBADA datasets. For BERT training, we swapped the position of the layer normalization and the residual connection in the model architecture (similar to GPT-2 architucture), which allowed the models to continue to improve as they were scaled up. Our BERT models with 3.9 billion parameters reaches a loss of 1.16, SQuAD 2.0 F1-score of 91.7, and RACE accuracy of 90.9%.
Using our GPT-2 model we achieve a perplexity of 10.8 on the WikiText-103 dataset (improving SOTA from 15.8) and an accuracy of 66.5% on the LAMBADA datasets. For BERT training, we swapped the position of the layer normalization and the residual connection in the model architecture (similar to GPT-2 architucture), which allowed the models to continue to improve as they were scaled up. Our BERT model with 3.9 billion parameters reaches a loss of 1.16, SQuAD 2.0 F1-score of 91.7, and RACE accuracy of 90.9%.
Our codebase is capable of efficiently training very large (several billion parameter) language models with both model and data parallelism. To demonstrate how the code scales with multiple GPUs we consider the following GPT-2 model sizes. All models use a vocabulary size of 51,200 and a sequence length of 1024.
