ProxyLM: Predicting Language Model Performance on Multilingual Tasks via Proxy Models

Performance prediction is a method to estimate the performance of Language Models (LMs) on various NLP tasks, mitigating computational costs associated with model capacity and data for fine-tuning. Our paper introduces ProxyLM, a scalable framework for predicting LM performance using proxy models in multilingual tasks. These proxy models act as surrogates, approximating the performance of the LM of interest. By leveraging proxy models, ProxyLM significantly reduces computational overhead on task evaluations, achieving up to a 37.08x speedup compared to traditional methods, even with our smallest proxy models. Additionally, our methodology showcases adaptability to previously unseen languages in pre-trained LMs, outperforming the state-of-the-art performance by 1.89x as measured by root-mean-square error (RMSE). This framework streamlines model selection, enabling efficient deployment and iterative LM enhancements without extensive computational resources.