Related papers: Mano: Restriking Manifold Optimization for LLM Tra…
Reinforcement learning (RL), particularly RL from verifiable reward (RLVR), has become a crucial phase of training large language models (LLMs) and a key focus of current scaling efforts. However, optimization practices in RL largely follow…
This study explores a novel approach to enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the optimization of input data within prompts. While previous research has primarily focused on refining instruction components and…
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,…
The rapid scaling of large language models (LLMs) has made low-precision training essential for reducing memory, improving efficiency, and enabling larger models and datasets. Existing convergence theories for adaptive optimizers, however,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) emerging as a key technique for downstream task adaptation. However, existing PEFT methods mainly operate in Euclidean space,…
In large-scale optimization, the cheapness and effectiveness of update steps are the most crucial factors for a successful optimizer. Sign-based optimizers like Lion or Signum produce cheap per-step updates, whereas Muon's spectral…
Training large language models (LLMs) relies almost exclusively on dense adaptive optimizers with increasingly sophisticated preconditioners. We challenge this by showing that randomly masking parameter updates can be highly effective, with…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance due to their large parameter counts and extensive training data. However, their scale leads to significant memory bottlenecks during training, especially when using…
While adaptive gradient methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning, sign-based optimization algorithms such as Lion and Muon have recently demonstrated superior empirical performance over AdamW in training large language models…
Muon has recently emerged as a competitive alternative to AdamW for large-scale pre-training, with orthogonalization via Newton-Schulz (NS) iterations as its core operation. Existing Muon variants apply a uniform NS schedule to all…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are currently pre-trained and fine-tuned on large cloud servers. The next frontier is LLM personalization, where a foundation model can be fine-tuned with user/task-specific data. Given the sensitive nature of…
Training large language models (LLMs) relies on adaptive optimizers such as Adam, which introduce extra operations and require significantly more memory to maintain first- and second-order moments than SGD. While recent works such as…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. Typically, LLMs are first pre-trained on large corpora and subsequently fine-tuned on task-specific datasets. However, during fine-tuning,…
In contrast to single-objective optimization (SOO), multi-objective optimization (MOO) requires an optimizer to find the Pareto frontier, a subset of feasible solutions that are not dominated by other feasible solutions. In this paper, we…
Recent advanced large language models (LLMs) have showcased their emergent capability of in-context learning, facilitating intelligent decision-making through natural language prompts without retraining. This new machine learning paradigm…
AdamW has long been the dominant optimizer in language model pretraining, despite numerous claims that alternative optimizers offer 1.4 to 2x speedup. We posit that two methodological shortcomings have obscured fair comparisons and hindered…
While spectral-based optimizers like Muon operate directly on the spectrum of updates, standard adaptive methods such as AdamW do not account for the spectral structure of weights and gradients, leaving them vulnerable to two empirical…
Prompt engineering, as an efficient and effective way to leverage Large Language Models (LLM), has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. The existing research primarily emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to…
DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints. However, DiLoCo's performance has been shown to degrade as the…
Optimizers play a decisive role in reducing pre-training times for LLMs and achieving better-performing models. In this study, we compare three major variants: the de-facto standard AdamW, the simpler Lion, developed through an evolutionary…