Related papers: Does Your Optimizer Care How You Normalize? Normal…

The standard normalization method for neural network (NN) models used in Natural Language Processing (NLP) is layer normalization (LN). This is different than batch normalization (BN), which is widely-adopted in Computer Vision. The…

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve competitive performance across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet pretraining is computationally demanding, making optimizer efficiency an important practical consideration. Muon…

For a long period of time, Adam has served as the ubiquitous default choice for training deep neural networks. Recently, many new optimizers have been introduced, out of which Muon has perhaps gained the highest popularity due to its…

Discount regularization, using a shorter planning horizon when calculating the optimal policy, is a popular choice to restrict planning to a less complex set of policies when estimating an MDP from sparse or noisy data (Jiang et al., 2015).…

Deep Metric Learning (DML) is arguably one of the most influential lines of research for learning visual similarities with many proposed approaches every year. Although the field benefits from the rapid progress, the divergence in training…

Learning to Optimize (L2O) enhances optimization efficiency with integrated neural networks. L2O paradigms achieve great outcomes, e.g., refitting optimizer, generating unseen solutions iteratively or directly. However, conventional L2O…

Training large language models (LLMs) typically relies on adaptive optimizers like Adam (Kingma & Ba, 2015) which store additional state information to accelerate convergence but incur significant memory overhead. Recent efforts, such as…

Batch normalization (BN) is comprised of a normalization component followed by an affine transformation and has become essential for training deep neural networks. Standard initialization of each BN in a network sets the affine…

Batch Normalization (BN) has played a pivotal role in the success of deep learning by improving training stability, mitigating overfitting, and enabling more effective optimization. However, its adoption in deep reinforcement learning (DRL)…

Layer normalization (LN) is a widely adopted deep learning technique especially in the era of foundation models. Recently, LN has been shown to be surprisingly effective in federated learning (FL) with non-i.i.d. data. However, exactly why…

The exponential growth in LLM scales, with parameters soaring from billions to trillions, has necessitated distributed pretraining across large clusters comprising thousands to tens of thousands of devices. While hybrid parallelization…

Batch Normalization (BN) uses mini-batch statistics to normalize the activations during training, introducing dependence between mini-batch elements. This dependency can hurt the performance if the mini-batch size is too small, or if the…

We introduce a constrained optimization framework for training transformers that behave like optimization descent algorithms. Specifically, we enforce layerwise descent constraints on the objective function and replace standard empirical…

Normalization is a vital process for any machine learning task as it controls the properties of data and affects model performance at large. The impact of particular forms of normalization, however, has so far been investigated in limited…

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become one of the most widely used fine-tuning mechanisms for adapting large language models to new domains, tasks, and users. Yet adaptation performance alone can obscure an important failure mode: LoRA…

Orthogonalized-update optimizers such as Muon improve training of matrix-valued parameters, but existing extensions typically either rescale updates after orthogonalization or use heavier whitening-based preconditioners before it. We…

Normalization techniques have only recently begun to be exploited in supervised learning tasks. Batch normalization exploits mini-batch statistics to normalize the activations. This was shown to speed up training and result in better…

ReLU neural networks trained as surrogate models can be embedded exactly in mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), enabling global optimization over the learned function. The tractability of the resulting MILP depends on structural…

Normalization layers are a staple in state-of-the-art deep neural network architectures. They are widely believed to stabilize training, enable higher learning rate, accelerate convergence and improve generalization, though the reason for…

Recent works (e.g., (Li and Arora, 2020)) suggest that the use of popular normalization schemes (including Batch Normalization) in today's deep learning can move it far from a traditional optimization viewpoint, e.g., use of exponentially…