PanGu-π Pro:Rethinking Optimization and Architecture for Tiny Language Models
On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking
Abstract (arXiv)
The power of large language models (LLMs) has been demonstrated through numerous data and computing resources. However, the application of language models on mobile devices is facing huge challenge on the computation and memory costs, that is, tiny language models with high performance are urgently required. Limited by the highly complex training process, there are many details for optimizing language models that are seldom studied carefully. In this study, based on a tiny language model with 1B parameters, we carefully design a series of empirical study to analyze the effect of each component. Three perspectives are mainly discussed, ie, neural architecture, parameter initialization, and optimization strategy. Several design formulas are empirically proved especially effective for tiny language models, including tokenizer compression, architecture tweaking, parameter inheritance and multiple-round training. Then we train PanGu-π-1B Pro and PanGu-π-1.5B Pro on 1.6T multilingual corpora, following the established formulas. Experimental results demonstrate the improved optimization and architecture yield a notable average improvement of 8.87 on benchmark evaluation sets for PanGu-π-1B Pro. Besides, PanGu-π-1.5B Pro surpasses a range of SOTA models with larger model sizes, validating its superior performance. The code is available at https://github.com/YuchuanTian/RethinkTinyLM.
Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 27 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2024.
Builds on
27 of 58 references.
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 8; 2025: 6.
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