arXiv AI

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.

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 Machine Learning
23h ago

TACO: Ternary Absolute-max Column-wise One-sparse Optimizer for LLM Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces TACO, a new optimizer for fine‑tuning large language models that drastically reduces optimizer state memory while preserving first‑order gradients. TACO selects the sign of the largest magnitude entry in each column of weight matrices, achieving a 174× reduction in persistent optimizer memory compared to AdamW8bit and a 2.9× decrease in peak training memory on OPT‑13B. This allows full‑parameter fine‑tuning of 30–32B‑parameter models on a single 80 GB GPU across multiple model families and tasks, with comparable accuracy and runtime to existing methods.

By Jichao Jiang (University of Central Florida), Cristian McGee (University of Central Florida), El Houcine Bergou (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University), Hanqin Cai (University of Central Florida), Aritra Dutta (University of Central Florida)
arXiv AI
Jul 24

SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

arXiv:2607. 20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale.

By Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Optimizer Memory Schedules for Outscaling the Overtraining Axis

The paper studies how different optimizers perform as training duration (overtraining) increases, focusing on matrix‑preconditioned methods (Muon, SOAP) and a momentum‑scheduled method (ADANA) compared to AdamW. Across models ranging from 51M to 253M parameters and overtraining factors up to 256×, the authors find that optimal learning‑rate schedules, weight‑decay coefficients, and memory settings shift with horizon, and that ADANA consistently outperforms AdamW, especially with log‑time weight decay and momentum cooldown. Muon and SOAP maintain roughly constant token‑efficiency advantages, with SOAP potentially improving at the highest overtraining levels.

By Katie Everett, Shikai Qiu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Learning rate adaptive stochastic gradient descent optimization methods: numerical simulations for deep learning methods for partial differential equations and convergence analyses

arXiv:2406. 14340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as adaptive methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (particularly, in the situation of constant learning rates).

By Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen, Adrian Riekert