arXiv Machine Learning

AdaGC: Enhancing LLM Pretraining Stability via Adaptive Gradient Clipping

arXiv:2502. 11034v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loss spikes remain a persistent obstacle in large-scale language model pretraining.

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Gefen: Optimized Stochastic Optimizer

arXiv:2606. 13894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AdamW is a default optimizer for modern deep learning, but its first and second moment states add roughly two parameter-sized buffers to training memory.

By Nadav Benedek, Tomer Koren, Ohad Fried
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Memory Savings at What Cost? A Study of Alternatives to Backpropagation

arXiv:2506. 21833v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forward-mode automatic differentiation (FmAD) and zero-order (ZO) optimization are increasingly proposed as memory-efficient, backpropagation-free alternatives for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, yet their benefits are typically evaluated only against standard backpropagation (BP), omitting memory-efficient variants such as activation checkpointing.

By Kunjal Panchal, Sunav Choudhary, Yuriy Brun, Hui Guan
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

GradientStabilizer:Fix the Norm, Not the Gradient

arXiv:2502. 17055v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimizer state, and lead to slow recovery or divergence.

By Tianjin Huang, Zhangyang Wang, Haotian Hu, Zhenyu Zhang, Gaojie Jin, Xiang Li, Li Shen, Jiaxing Shang, Tianlong Chen, Ke Li, Lu Liu, Qingsong Wen, Shiwei Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

SCAPE: Accurate and Efficient LLM Training with Extreme Sparse Communication

arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.

By Mingkai Zheng, Junlin Chen, Haotian Xie, Zhao Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

AOS: Adaptive Optimizer Switching via Training-State Signals for Faster Convergence and Better Generalization

arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.

By Alok Kumar Pandey, Umang Chaturvedi, Aatish Rana, Gopi Krishna Nedanuri
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Gradient Under Microscope: Benchmarking Resource Utilization of Memory-Efficient Gradient Computation Methods

arXiv:2608. 08961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI training's rising resource intensity is straining electricity supplies and carbon budgets, motivating systematic study of memory-efficient training on constrained hardware.

By Sarthak Mahapatra, Zihan Zhou, Khatoon Khedri, Mehdi Hosseinzadeh, Reza Rawassizadeh
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Memory-Efficient LLM Training with Dynamic Sparsity: From Stability to Practical Scaling

arXiv:2606. 00888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) offers a promising paradigm for improving the training and inference efficiency of deep neural networks; however, we find that in large language model training, DST can suffer from optimization instability, manifested as loss spikes after topology updates.

By Qiao Xiao, Boqian Wu, Patrik Okanovic, Tomasz Sternal, Maurice van Keulen, Elena Mocanu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Torsten Hoefler
arXiv AI
Jun 15

The Curse and Blessing of Mean Bias in FP4-Quantized LLM Training

arXiv:2603. 10444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: FP4 training promises substantial memory and compute savings for large language models, but remains fragile because blockwise quantization is dictated by extreme activation magnitudes, which inflate dynamic range and compress long-tail signals.

By Hengjie Cao, Zhendong Huang, Mengyi Chen, Yifeng Yang, Fang Dong, Anrui Chen, Ruijun Huang, Xin Zhang, Mingzhi Dong, Yujiang Wang, Jinlong Hou, Qin Lv, Robert P. Dick, Yuan Cheng, Tun Lu, Fan Yang, Yixuan Chen, Li Shang