Predictable Scaling: Efficient Model Exploration via Scaling-Law Prediction

Aishwarya Wesanekar, Sheng-Tao Yang, Jiawei Zhang, Flavio Sales Truzzi, Chen Chen +18

Evaluating candidate changes (hypotheses) to recommendation models requires full-scale training runs consuming thousands of GPU-hours, severely limiting the hypothesis space engineers can feasibly explore. We introduce Predictable Scaling (PS), a systematic framework that exploits empirically verified regularity conditions to predict full-scale model performance from small-scale proxies. PS constructs scaled-down variants via composable scaling functions along distinct resource axes, and projects metrics to the target scale via curve fitting with calibrated uncertainty estimates. We compare three prediction strategies of increasing expressiveness: even the simplest (raw proxy) achieves prediction error within the empirical noise floor of repeated-run variance; the most expressive (Gaussian Process) provides an indicative 15% relative MAE improvement and calibrated uncertainty. Evaluation on two ranking models of increasing complexity---a task-specific model and a foundation model---demonstrates that PS correctly ranks actionable hypotheses across diverse hypothesis types at 79-88% compute reductions.