arXiv AI

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.

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 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 AI
Sep 7

Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference

The paper demonstrates that layer dropout, also known as stochastic depth, can be effectively used in state‑of‑the‑art large language model (LLM) training. By optimizing the layer distribution, schedule, and optimizer settings, the authors show that layer dropout can reduce training loss while saving up to 25 % of training FLOPs. Additionally, layer dropout enables post‑training optimizations such as early exit and self‑speculative decoding, achieving up to 1.5× inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss across models ranging from 271 M to 8.2 B parameters and datasets up to 160 B tokens.

By Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Gavia Gray, Gurpreet Gosal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 30

Why Do We Need Warm-up? A Theoretical Perspective

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