Related papers: Sign-Based Optimizers Are Effective Under Heavy-Ta…
In this paper, we present enhanced analysis for sign-based optimization algorithms with momentum updates. Traditional sign-based methods, under the separable smoothness assumption, guarantee a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(T^{-1/4})$,…
Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…
Adopting a two-stage paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved substantial advancements in the field of natural language processing. However, in real-world scenarios, data labels are…
Configuration optimization remains a critical bottleneck in machine learning, requiring coordinated tuning across model architecture, training strategy, feature engineering, and hyperparameters. Traditional approaches treat these dimensions…
This study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit consistent behavior (signal) or random variation (noise) when screening resumes against job descriptions, and how their performance compares to human experts. Using…
Recent optimizers such as Lion and Muon have demonstrated strong empirical performance by normalizing gradient momentum via linear minimization oracles (LMOs). While variance reduction has been explored to accelerate LMO-based methods, it…
The fine-tuning paradigm has emerged as a prominent approach for addressing long-tail learning tasks in the era of foundation models. However, the impact of fine-tuning strategies on long-tail learning performance remains unexplored. In…
The AdamW optimizer, while standard for LLM pretraining, is a critical memory bottleneck, consuming optimizer states equivalent to twice the model's size. Although light-state optimizers like SinkGD attempt to address this issue, we…
The advent of large-scale pre-trained language models has contributed greatly to the recent progress in natural language processing. Many state-of-the-art language models are first trained on a large text corpus and then fine-tuned on…
We introduce a general framework for nonlinear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the scenarios when gradient noise exhibits heavy tails. The proposed framework subsumes several popular nonlinearity choices, like clipped, normalized,…
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized lots of fields of research. Although it is well-known that fine-tuning is essential for enhancing the capabilities of LLMs, existing research suggests that there is potential redundancy in…
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,…
Test-time scaling has emerged as a critical avenue for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Though the straight-forward ''best-of-$N$'' (BoN) strategy has already demonstrated significant improvements in…
We consider a standard distributed optimization problem in which networked nodes collaboratively minimize the sum of their locally known convex costs. For this setting, we address for the first time the fundamental problem of design and…
Training instability remains a critical challenge in large language model (LLM) pretraining, often manifesting as sudden gradient explosions that waste significant computational resources. We study training failures in a 5M-parameter…
End-to-end Large Speech Language Models (LSLMs) have demonstrated impressive conversational generation abilities, yet consistently fall short of traditional pipeline systems on semantic understanding benchmarks. In this work, we reveal…
Training instabilities such as loss spikes are frequently the result of stochastic gradient noise. Because of rare expressions in language training data, and multiple layer composition, the noise impact is heavy-tailed and survives…
This paper introduces SignAgent, a novel agentic framework that utilises Large Language Models (LLMs) for scalable, linguistically-grounded Sign Language (SL) annotation and dataset curation. Traditional computational methods for SLs often…
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have played an increasingly important role in multimodal intelligence. However, the existing fine-tuning methods often ignore cross-modal heterogeneity, limiting their full potential. In this work,…
The reliable application of deep learning models to software engineering tasks hinges on high-quality training data. Yet, large-scale repositories inevitably introduce noisy or mislabeled examples that degrade both accuracy and robustness.…