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: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
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:2602. 00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time.
By Jiamin Xu, Kyra Gan
arXiv:2606. 03938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-epoch training is becoming the standard now that compute is growing faster than the supply of high-quality text.
By Bishwas Mandal, Shmuel Berman, Akshay Vegesna, Samip Dahal
arXiv:2607. 12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cooldown phase of a warmup-stable-decay (WSD) learning-rate schedule, now a default in large-model pretraining, lowers the final training loss in some settings and does nothing in others.
By Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut
arXiv:2606. 01827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) has established itself as a powerful and widely adopted optimizer for training machine learning models.
By Dimitris Oikonomou, Nicolas Loizou
ExpTest is an autonomous learning‑rate controller that uses the training loss curve as an online signal to perform sequential statistical tests on theoretically motivated windows, detecting convergent behavior and triggering learning‑rate reductions. It combines a covariance‑based initial learning‑rate estimate, curvature‑motivated window sizing, and a two‑phase test‑driven decay, relying on the approximately exponential decay predicted under linearized network dynamics. Experiments on regression, classification, forecasting, and natural‑language tasks across various architectures show that ExpTest achieves competitive performance compared to hand‑tuned SGD baselines and recent learning‑rate‑free methods, without requiring manual initial learning‑rate selection or predefined scheduling.
By Zan Chaudhry, Naoko Mizuno
arXiv:2510. 03164v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning rate warm-up -- increasing the learning rate at the beginning of training -- has become a ubiquitous heuristic in modern deep learning, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood.
By Foivos Alimisis, Rustem Islamov, Aurelien Lucchi
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
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:2608. 25551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is typically analyzed at a deterministic horizon chosen before the algorithm is run, even though practical stopping decisions are made adaptively by inspecting the evolving trajectory.
By Liviu Aolaritei, Lucas L\'evy, Francis Bach, Michael I. Jordan