arXiv Machine Learning

When Is Availability-Aware Training Worth It? A Benchmark and Empirical Study of Interruption-Resilient Optimization Under Predictable Compute Schedules

The paper introduces OrbitTrace, a benchmark of 50 physics‑grounded compute‑availability traces from satellite orbits, and investigates whether specialized interruption‑resilient optimizers are needed when training is interrupted by predictable compute gaps. Experiments on CIFAR‑10/ResNet‑18 and GPT‑2/AdamW show that a strong checkpoint‑and‑resume baseline that preserves full optimizer state and indexes learning‑rate schedules in effective time matches uninterrupted training, rendering most availability‑aware methods unnecessary. Only in a narrow regime—large models with non‑persistable optimizer state and frequent short pauses—does reactive adaptation recover a modest portion of the state‑loss penalty, and even this benefit disappears for eclipse‑scale gaps.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

When RL Meets Adaptive Speculative Training: A Unified Training-Serving System

arXiv:2602. 06932v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Speculative decoding can significantly accelerate LLM serving, yet most deployments today disentangle speculator training from serving, treating speculator training as a standalone offline modeling problem.

By Junxiong Wang, Fengxiang Bie, Jisen Li, Zhongzhu Zhou, Zelei Shao, Yubo Wang, Yinghui Liu, Qingyang Wu, Avner May, Sri Yanamandra, Ce Zhang, Tri Dao, Percy Liang, Ben Athiwaratkun, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaoxia Wu
arXiv AI
Oct 15

Two Clocks: Why Larger Rollout Batches Learn Slower but Fail on Schedule in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

The paper investigates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), where costly model-generated responses encourage larger rollout batches and a square‑root learning‑rate scaling. Using a two‑clock framework, the authors show that while the square‑root rule preserves first‑order drift per sample, larger batches suffer from curvature losses, leading to a critical batch size beyond which sample efficiency degrades. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑Math‑1.5B confirm the predicted progress gap and failure clock, and the authors propose a simple multi‑step RLVR schedule that starts below the critical batch and switches to a larger batch before failure.

By Yuante Li, Junwei Quan, Kai Qiu, Kate Zhang, Yicheng Tao
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

Checkpoint Reload Explains Most of the Measured State Gap in Two State Discovery Reproductions

The paper investigates whether the latent states reconstructed during inference match those stored during training in temporal models, focusing on State Discovery in World Machine. By comparing stored state tables with rollouts from the best‑validation checkpoint and the last‑epoch weights, the authors find that reloading the checkpoint used to write the table eliminates 90–91% of the mean per‑dimension Wasserstein‑1 distance, explaining most of the observed state gap. Causal distillation and frozen SD updates fail to meet their criteria under either checkpoint.

By Weijia Han, Lisha Qu
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical: training-inference divergence governs approximation error in finite-horizon bounds, whereas PPO clipping only gates sampled outward updates, acting as a sampled surrogate rather than a full-policy constraint.

arXiv AI
Oct 23

Resuming Vision-Language Inference across Onboard Interruptions

OrbitWeaver is a framework that enables vision‑language models to resume inference after onboard interruptions on low‑Earth orbit satellites. It uses phase‑aware checkpointing and dependency‑aware dynamic recovery to preserve progress across power, thermal, and fault‑induced shutdowns, reducing restart latency and SSD write volume. Experiments on satellite payload hardware show up to a 4.07‑fold speedup and a 3.56‑fold reduction in write traffic, and a 72‑hour deployment confirmed its ability to maintain inference progress across repeated bus‑enforced shutdowns.

By Xiaolong Huang, Yinyuan Zhang, Daliang Xu, Yun Ma, Qing Li, Mengwei Xu, Shangguang Wang, Gang Huang, Xuanzhe Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 22

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing.

By Junyao Yang, Yucheng Shi, Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Ruhan Wang, Xiangxin Zhou, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang