Related papers: Seesaw: Accelerating Training by Balancing Learnin…

The increasing complexity of modern deep neural network models and the expanding sizes of datasets necessitate the development of optimized and scalable training methods. In this white paper, we addressed the challenge of efficiently…

Setting the learning rate (LR) for a deep learning model is a critical part of successful training. Choosing LRs is often done empirically with trial and error. In this work, we explore a solvable model of optimal LR schedules for a…

Synchronous strategies with data parallelism, such as the Synchronous StochasticGradient Descent (S-SGD) and the model averaging methods, are widely utilizedin distributed training of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), largely owing to itseasy…

The choice of batch sizes in minibatch stochastic gradient optimizers is critical in large-scale model training for both optimization and generalization performance. Although large-batch training is arguably the dominant training paradigm…

Stochastic gradient-based descent (SGD), have long been central to training large language models (LLMs). However, their effectiveness is increasingly being questioned, particularly in large-scale applications where empirical evidence…

The learning rate in stochastic gradient methods is a critical hyperparameter that is notoriously costly to tune via standard grid search, especially for training modern large-scale models with billions of parameters. We identify a…

We study the effect of mini-batching on the loss landscape of deep neural networks using spiked, field-dependent random matrix theory. We demonstrate that the magnitude of the extremal values of the batch Hessian are larger than those of…

The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy is lagging,…

Schedule-Free SGD, proposed in [Defazio et al., 2024], achieves optimal convergence rates without requiring the training horizon in advance, by replacing learning rate schedules with a principled form of iterate averaging. However, the…

Modern deep neural networks often require distributed training with many workers due to their large size. As the number of workers increases, communication overheads become the main bottleneck in data-parallel minibatch stochastic gradient…

The scale of deep learning nowadays calls for efficient distributed training algorithms. Decentralized momentum SGD (DmSGD), in which each node averages only with its neighbors, is more communication efficient than vanilla Parallel momentum…

We propose a stochastic optimization method for minimizing loss functions, expressed as an expected value, that adaptively controls the batch size used in the computation of gradient approximations and the step size used to move along such…

Intriguing empirical evidence exists that deep learning can work well with exoticschedules for varying the learning rate. This paper suggests that the phenomenon may be due to Batch Normalization or BN, which is ubiquitous and provides…

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…

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…

Learning rate, batch size and momentum are three important hyperparameters in the SGD algorithm. It is known from the work of Jastrzebski et al. arXiv:1711.04623 that large batch size training of neural networks yields models which do not…

Mini-batch stochastic gradient descent and variants thereof have become standard for large-scale empirical risk minimization like the training of neural networks. These methods are usually used with a constant batch size chosen by simple…

Due to the scarcity of high-quality data, large language models (LLMs) are often trained on mixtures of data with varying quality levels, even after sophisticated data curation. A natural approach to better leverage high-quality data is…

Distributed machine learning is critical for training deep learning models on large datasets with numerous parameters. Current research primarily focuses on leveraging additional hardware resources and powerful computing units to accelerate…

It is known that the standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as accelerated and adaptive SGD optimization methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (as,…