Related papers: Extending $\mu$P: Spectral Conditions for Feature …
We present Adjacent Possible Exploration (APE), a selective fine-tuning method for adapting large language models that systematically explores parameter modifications while maintaining model stability. Inspired by evolutionary optimization…
Although scaling up the number of trainable parameters in both pre-training and fine-tuning can effectively improve the performance of large language models, it also leads to increased computational overhead. When delving into the parameter…
Recent works have shown that gradient-update alignment is a powerful signal for modulating optimizer updates, often leading to faster training. We promote this update-wise heuristic as a mathematically grounded principle for selecting and…
We propose a framework for online meta-optimization of parameters that govern optimization, called Amortized Proximal Optimization (APO). We first interpret various existing neural network optimizers as approximate stochastic proximal point…
After developer adjustments to a machine learning (ML) algorithm, how can the results of an old hyperparameter optimization (HPO) automatically be used to speedup a new HPO? This question poses a challenging problem, as developer…
Adaptive optimization algorithms, particularly Adam and its variant AdamW, are fundamental components of modern deep learning. However, their training dynamics lack comprehensive theoretical understanding, with limited insight into why…
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…
This work focuses on the problem of hyper-parameter tuning (HPT) for robust (i.e., adversarially trained) models, shedding light on the new challenges and opportunities arising during the HPT process for robust models. To this end, we…
Learning rate scheduling is crucial for training large language models, yet understanding the optimal annealing strategies across different model configurations remains challenging. In this work, we investigate the transferability of…
Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are widely used statistical models for modeling sequential data. The parameter estimation for HMMs from time series data is an important learning problem. The predominant methods for parameter estimation are…
Recently, the Muon optimizer based on matrix orthogonalization has demonstrated strong results in training small-scale language models, but the scalability to larger models has not been proven. We identify two crucial techniques for scaling…
High-dimensional measurements are often correlated which motivates their approximation by factor models. This holds also true when features are engineered via low-dimensional interactions or kernel tricks. This often results in over…
Measurement update rules for Bayes filters often contain hand-crafted heuristics to compute observation probabilities for high-dimensional sensor data, like images. In this work, we propose the novel approach Deep Measurement Update (DMU)…
Accelerated training algorithms, such as adaptive learning rates (or preconditioning) and various normalization methods, are widely used but not fully understood. When regularization is introduced, standard optimizers like adaptive learning…
This work studies the general principles of improving the learning of language models (LMs), which aims at reducing the necessary training steps for achieving superior performance. Specifically, we present a theory for the optimal learning…
Hyperparameters are configuration variables controlling the behavior of machine learning algorithms. They are ubiquitous in machine learning and artificial intelligence and the choice of their values determines the effectiveness of systems…
We propose a new reinforcement learning algorithm for partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDP) based on spectral decomposition methods. While spectral methods have been previously employed for consistent learning of (passive)…
Large language models have demonstrated capabilities in text generation, while their increasing parameter scales present challenges in computational and memory efficiency. Post-training sparsity (PTS), which reduces model cost by removing…
Hyperparameter optimization, also known as hyperparameter tuning, is a widely recognized technique for improving model performance. Regrettably, when training private ML models, many practitioners often overlook the privacy risks associated…
This paper introduces new parameter-free first-order methods for convex optimization problems in which the objective function exhibits H\"{o}lder smoothness. Inspired by the recently proposed distance-over-gradient (DOG) technique, we…