OptiSelect is a framework that incorporates the optimizer’s effect into online data selection for large language model pretraining. The study shows that optimizers like Lion and Muon, which use sign-based or polar-tangential preconditioners, suffer from a discriminability collapse that limits selection gains, whereas diagonal‑adaptive optimizers such as AdamW and Sophia can achieve higher gains. Experiments on 124M and 720M models confirm the theory and demonstrate that OptiSelect remains effective even when data is rephrased.
arXiv:2510. 06048v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks.
arXiv:2607. 04033v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizer selection for large-scale model training has become a system-level design decision constrained jointly by compute, memory, tuning budget, and task diversity, yet the landscape of over one hundred methods remains fragmented.
Every supervised fine-tuning run forces the same chain of decisions, such as learning rate, batch size, LoRA or full fine-tuning, how many epochs, which optimiser, and what data to feed the model. Eac...
arXiv:2609.01244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every supervised fine-tuning run forces the same chain of decisions, such as learning rate, batch size, LoRA or full fine-tuning, how many epochs, whic...
arXiv:2606. 13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models.
Data-DPO is a target model‑oriented supervised fine‑tuning data selection method that uses one‑step probing of the target model to generate pairwise data preferences, trains a lightweight reward model to capture these preferences, and then selects a training subset by combining target‑model preference, external quality scores, and marginal diversity. Experiments on Vision‑Flan and LLaVA‑CoT demonstrate that Data‑DPO consistently outperforms existing data selection baselines across multiple data budgets and even surpasses full data training performance.
arXiv:2602. 14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task.
arXiv:2607. 26247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tunes large pretrained models at a fraction of the cost of full fine-tuning, but its performance depends strongly on how the adapters are initialized.
The paper introduces ISO-LoRA, an optimizer that improves rank utilization in Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) by coupling factor updates through spectral descent on the induced tangent perturbation in weight space. Experiments on GPT‑2 adaptation show that standard optimizers like AdamW concentrate updates in a few singular directions, whereas ISO-LoRA distributes energy more evenly, leading to higher effective rank and better downstream performance across 0.1B‑7B models. The authors provide theoretical guarantees under a stylized spiked‑gradient model and demonstrate that ISO-LoRA consistently outperforms factor‑wise optimizers, especially at moderate‑to‑large LoRA ranks.
arXiv:2606. 31591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) is a recently discovered phenomenon in LLMs where fine-tuning on a narrow misaligned task, such as writing insecure code, leads to broadly misaligned behaviour on unrelated prompts.
arXiv:2610.00403v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optimizers can fit the same task while acquiring different generalizing relations. We study the training conditions governing these differences in...
tidyHEBO is a BoTorch-native Bayesian optimization tool that jointly applies Yeo-Johnson output warping to a Gaussian‑process surrogate, evaluates acquisition functions on the original objective scale, and conducts constrained cumulative Pareto search across multiple acquisition criteria. Using only default settings, it outperformed other methods on the Olympus benchmark and performed strongly on synthetic, Needle‑in‑a‑Haystack, and Bayesmark tasks, while adaptive batching offered a trade‑off between parallelization and optimization quality. These results position tidyHEBO as a robust, reproducible optimizer suitable for diverse practical problems, including scientific applications and hyperparameter tuning.