Related papers: APOLLO: SGD-like Memory, AdamW-level Performance

The rapid progress of Transformers in artificial intelligence has come at the cost of increased resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions due to growing model sizes. Prior work suggests using pretrained small models to improve…

Adaptive first-order optimizers are fundamental tools in deep learning, although they may suffer from poor generalization due to the nonuniform gradient scaling. In this work, we propose AdamL, a novel variant of the Adam optimizer, that…

We introduce AdamS, a simple yet effective alternative to Adam for large language model (LLM) pretraining and post-training. By leveraging a novel denominator, i.e., the root of weighted sum of squares of the momentum and the current…

Large language model (LLM) training today runs on clusters spanning thousands of GPUs. While this scale enables rapid model advances, developing, debugging, and performance-tuning the training framework inevitably becomes complex and…

Training large language models (LLMs) is often constrained by GPU memory limitations. To alleviate memory pressure, activation recomputation and data compression have been proposed as two major strategies. However, both approaches have…

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks with verifiable rewards. However, standard token-level PPO struggles in this setting due to the instability of temporal credit…

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows promise in training tool-use Large Language Models (LLMs) using verifiable outcome rewards, existing methods largely overlook the potential of reasoning rewards based on chain-of-thought quality for…

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for reasoning tasks using reinforcement learning methods like Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) is computationally expensive. To address this, we propose a predictive framework that models…

The rapid scaling of models has led to prohibitively high training and fine-tuning costs. A major factor accounting for memory consumption is the widespread use of stateful optimizers (e.g., Adam), which maintain auxiliary information of…

Recent research explores optimization using large language models (LLMs) by either iteratively seeking next-step solutions from LLMs or directly prompting LLMs for an optimizer. However, these approaches exhibit inherent limitations,…

Transformers and large language models~(LLMs) have seen rapid adoption in all domains. Their sizes have exploded to hundreds of billions of parameters and keep increasing. Under these circumstances, the training of transformers is very…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in automating software development tasks. While recent advances leverage Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to align models with human…

While fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for specific tasks often yields impressive results, it comes at the cost of memory inefficiency due to back-propagation in gradient-based training. Memory-efficient Zeroth-order (MeZO)…

Fine-tuning large pre-trained LLMs generally demands extensive GPU memory. Traditional first-order optimizers like SGD encounter substantial difficulties due to increased memory requirements from storing activations and gradients during…

Adaptive optimizers with decoupled weight decay, such as AdamW, are the de facto standard for pre-training large transformer-based generative models. Yet the quadratic nature of the $\ell_2$ penalty embedded in weight decay drives all…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as an effective approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), especially in scenarios where supervised fine-tuning (SFT) falls short due to limited…

The rapid development of large language models (LLM) has greatly enhanced everyday applications. While many FPGA-based accelerators, with flexibility for fine-grained data control, exhibit superior speed and energy efficiency compared to…

Adam is the go-to optimizer for training modern machine learning models, but it requires additional memory to maintain the moving averages of the gradients and their squares. While various low-memory optimizers have been proposed that…

Lead optimization in drug discovery requires efficiently navigating vast chemical space through iterative cycles to enhance molecular properties while preserving structural similarity to the original lead compound. Despite recent advances,…

In this work, we question the necessity of adaptive gradient methods for training deep neural networks. SGD-SaI is a simple yet effective enhancement to stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM). SGD-SaI performs learning rate…