Beyond Sunk Costs: Boosting LLM Pre-training Efficiency via Orthogonal Growth of Mixture-of-Experts

As the computational demands for pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to surge, the need for efficient training paradigms becomes critical. Despite the vast resources already invested in existing pre-trained checkpoints, these assets often remain under-leveraged due to architectural limitations. We introduce an"orthogonal growth"strategy designed to"recycle"these checkpoints by strategically expanding their parameters prior to continued training. Our method focuses on optimizing converged Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models through two dimensions: interpositional layer copying for increased depth and noisy expert duplication for expanded width. Through extensive scaling laws analysis, we demonstrate a strong positive correlation between the"sunk cost"(prior investment) and the final model accuracy. Empirical results on models up to 70B parameters and 1T tokens show that our recycling approach yields a 10.6% accuracy improvement compared to training from scratch under identical extra compute budgets. This work provides a cost-effective blueprint for sustainable large-scale LLM development.