Related papers: Small Batch Size Training for Language Models: Whe…
LLM training is resource-intensive. Quantized training improves computational and memory efficiency but introduces quantization noise, which can hinder convergence and degrade model accuracy. Stochastic Rounding (SR) has emerged as a…
Stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) and its variants have been the dominating optimization methods in machine learning. Compared to SGD with small-batch training, SGD with large-batch training can better utilize the computational power of…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are almost universally used to train neural networks and to fit a variety of other parametric models. An important hyperparameter in this context is the batch size, which determines how…
Foundation models in speech are often trained using many GPUs, which implicitly leads to large effective batch sizes. In this paper we study the effect of batch size on pre-training, both in terms of statistics that can be monitored during…
When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…
Existing research shows that the batch size can seriously affect the performance of stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) based learning, including training speed and generalization ability. A larger batch size typically results in less…
In contrast to SGD, adaptive gradient methods like Adam allow robust training of modern deep networks, especially large language models. However, the use of adaptivity not only comes at the cost of extra memory but also raises the…
The current standard approach to scaling transformer language models trains each model size from a different random initialization. As an alternative, we consider a staged training setup that begins with a small model and incrementally…
In practice, the hyperparameters $(\beta_1, \beta_2)$ and weight-decay $\lambda$ in AdamW are typically kept at fixed values. Is there any reason to do otherwise? We show that for large-scale language model training, the answer is yes: by…
The mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is widely used in training machine learning models, in particular deep learning models. We study SGD dynamics under linear regression and two-layer linear networks, with an easy…
Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…
When using active learning, smaller batch sizes are typically more efficient from a learning efficiency perspective. However, in practice due to speed and human annotator considerations, the use of larger batch sizes is necessary. While…
The most straightforward method to accelerate Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) computation is to distribute the randomly selected batch of inputs over multiple processors. To keep the distributed processors fully utilized requires…
In this work, we investigate the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when training a single-neuron autoencoder with linear or ReLU activation on orthogonal data. We show that for this non-convex problem, randomly initialized SGD…
To maximize hardware utilization, modern machine learning systems typically employ large constant or manually tuned batch size schedules, relying on heuristics that are brittle and costly to tune. Existing adaptive strategies based on…
Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable advances in recent years, with scaling laws playing a critical role in this rapid progress. In this paper, we empirically investigate how a critical hyper-parameter, i.e., the global batch…
We study the role of batch size in stochastic conditional gradient methods under a $\mu$-Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz ($\mu$-KL) condition. Focusing on momentum-based stochastic conditional gradient algorithms (e.g., Scion), we derive a new…
Training and fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) come with challenges related to memory and computational requirements due to the increasing size of the model weights and the optimizer states. Various techniques have been developed to…
Recent advances in the theoretical understanding of SGD led to a formula for the optimal batch size minimizing the number of effective data passes, i.e., the number of iterations times the batch size. However, this formula is of no…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with mini-batching is a standard tool in large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical properties under heavy-tailed gradient noise remain largely unexplored. In this paper we study SGD with increasing…