arXiv:2510. 14717v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasing the batch size during training -- a ''batch ramp'' -- is a promising strategy to accelerate large language model pretraining.
By Alexandru Meterez, Depen Morwani, Jingfeng Wu, Costin-Andrei Oncescu, Cengiz Pehlevan, Sham Kakade
The paper presents empirical scaling laws for autoregressive language models, linking prediction loss to model size, data size, and compute, and investigates their theoretical basis using a teacher–student linear RNN framework. In this tractable setting, a stable latent linear RNN generates trajectories while a sketched linear recurrent student is trained via full‑batch WSD gradient descent on next‑token prediction. The study derives explicit approximation, optimization, and statistical scaling laws that depend on the sketch dimension, number of trajectories, and trajectory length, revealing how different power‑law exponents for innovation and initialization covariances affect the rates and crossovers between regimes.
By Ziyan Chen, Zhongzhu Zhou, Peilin Liu, Ding-Xuan Zhou
arXiv:2602.03702v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly trained in continual or open-ended settings, where the total training horizon is not known in advance....
By Alexandru Meterez, Pranav Ajit Nair, Depen Morwani, Cengiz Pehlevan, Sham Kakade
arXiv:2602.06797v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We study optimal learning rate (LR) schedules under the functional scaling law (FSL) framework (Li et al., 2025), which decomposes training d...
By Binghui Li, Zilin Wang, Fengling Chen, Shiyang Zhao, Ruiheng Zheng, Lei Wu
arXiv:2607. 22444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For scale-invariant deep networks, Hyperball-style optimizers have shown strong performance in large-scale training by fixing the norms of matrix-valued parameters and normalizing updates.
By Yihao Xiao, Jialong Sun, Zitian Gao, Zeming Wei, Chutian Wang, Ran Tao, Jiaye Teng, Bryan Dai
arXiv:2602. 12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data.
By Michael Crawshaw, Mingrui Liu
The paper derives an exact discrete‑time law that captures how learning‑rate schedules and weight decay interact in scale‑invariant neural networks, showing that a single scalar quantity governs the effective step size. It demonstrates that the balance point between contraction and expansion is intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics when using constant learning rates with weight decay. The authors extend this analysis to various optimizers and datasets, confirming the law’s precision and showing that performance peaks sharply at the predicted boundary.
By Hasan Amin, Wei-Kai Chang, Rajiv Khanna
arXiv:2607. 23777v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The discovery of scaling laws has motivated training neural networks on ever increasing quantities of data.
By Anuj Apte
arXiv:2607. 16821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Task arithmetic, sequential fine-tuning, activation steering, and first-order random search all operate through relatively small perturbations around an already trained checkpoint, and they rely on different local approximations: individual perturbations should be first-order predictable, task updates should compose with controlled interference, useful tangent structure should be stable and possible to estimate, and weight edits should have counterparts in representation space.
By Irina Piontkovskaia, Sergey Nikolenko
arXiv:2606. 29158v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-rate transfer can reduce the cost of training large language models: instead of sweeping learning rates at target scale, practitioners extrapolate from smaller runs.
By Zaiwen Yang, Huaqing Zhang, Jing Xu, Jingzhao Zhang
arXiv:2606. 25086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many modern Language Model (LM) pipelines return an averaged model, such as an exponential moving average of the training iterates, rather than the final iterate itself.
By Kwok Chun Au, Adam Block
arXiv:2609.36945v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We study the learning dynamics of fine-tuning a policy model on self-generated and reward-weighted data, with particular focus on a generalized version...
By Zhiwei Wang, Yanxi Chen, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding