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The rapid advancement of large-language models (LLMs) has driven extensive research into parameter compression after training has been completed, yet compression during the training phase remains largely unexplored. In this work, we…

A basic unanswered question in neural network training is: what is the best learning rate schedule shape for a given workload? The choice of learning rate schedule is a key factor in the success or failure of the training process, but…

Post-training algorithms such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) are widely used to adapt (multimodal) large language models to downstream tasks. While effective at task adaptation, their impact on retaining…

High-quality data is scarce in large language model (LLM) training, yet how to schedule its use jointly with training dynamics lacks theoretical guidance. We extend functional scaling laws by incorporating a data-quality dimension, and…

LLMs are commonly trained with a learning rate (LR) warmup, followed by cosine decay to 10% of the maximum (10x decay). In a large-scale empirical study, we show that under an optimal peak LR, a simple linear decay-to-zero (D2Z) schedule…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents show great promise for complex, multi-turn tool-use tasks, but their development is often hampered by the extreme scarcity of high-quality training data. Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on synthetic data leads…

Large language models (LLMs) trained via pretraining and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can still produce harmful and misaligned outputs, or struggle in domains like math and coding. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training methods,…

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning has become a crucial step in post-training language models for advanced mathematical reasoning and coding. Following the success of frontier reasoning models, recent work has demonstrated that…

We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- instead of perplexity…

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) accelerates taskspecific large language models (LLMs) development, but the resulting proliferation of finetuned models incurs substantial memory overhead. Delta compression addresses this by retaining a single…

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…

Batch size scheduling (BSS) plays a critical role in large-scale deep learning training, influencing both optimization dynamics and computational efficiency. Yet, its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we show…

The advent of transformer-based architectures and large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models. Since these LLMs are trained on huge corpuses of data from the web and…

Scaling test-time compute has emerged as a powerful mechanism for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) performance. However, standard post-training paradigms, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), optimize the…

Model growth from a given checkpoint aims to accelerate training of a larger model, offering potential resource savings. Despite recent interest, warmstarting has seen limited practical adoption in large-scale training. We attribute this to…

Recent years have seen an increase in the development of large deep learning (DL) models, which makes training efficiency crucial. Common practice is struggling with the trade-off between usability and performance. On one hand, DL…

Federated learning (FL) is a promising paradigm to enable collaborative model training with decentralized data. However, the training process of Large Language Models (LLMs) generally incurs the update of significant parameters, which…

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) reasoning have shown that sophisticated behaviors such as planning and self-reflection can emerge through reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite these successes, RL in its current form…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely adopted parameter-efficient method for fine-tuning Large Langauge Models. It updates the weight matrix as $W=W_0+sBA$, where $W_0$ is the original frozen weight, $s$ is a scaling factor and $A$,$B$ are…

We present a controlled study of how dataset contamination interacts with the post-training stages now standard in large language model training pipelines. Starting from clean checkpoints of Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B) and Gemma3 (1B/4B), we inject…