arXiv Machine Learning By Kabir Dev Paul Baghel, Radu Timofte, Dmitry Ignatov

Curating Same-Family Neural Networks for LLM-Guided Model Improvement: A Controlled Case Study

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The study investigates whether a curated same-family neural network experiment can guide large language model (LLM)-based improvements for a low-performing target model under equal generation and evaluation budgets. Using TuneNNGen, an extension of NNGPT, the authors compare source-guided generation with target-only generation on CIFAR-10, SVHN, Imagenette, and CIFAR-100 datasets, achieving significant accuracy gains across these benchmarks. The results demonstrate that the benefits depend on source-target compatibility and LLM adaptation, rather than merely on stored source accuracy.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

LESS: Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search in Minutes

LESS (Lightweight Evolutionary Supernet Search) is a data‑driven NAS method that uses a brief hard‑path warm‑up and CMA‑ES to evaluate candidate architectures as decoded hard genotypes after six supernet updates. On NAS‑Bench‑201, LESS attains 93.189 % CIFAR‑10 accuracy in just 409.1 seconds, nearly matching FairNAS while using only about 1/24 of its search time. The approach also transfers well to CIFAR‑100, ImageNet16‑120, and the larger DARTS space, achieving high accuracies with searches completed in roughly 43.5 minutes on a single GPU.

By Aviral Gandhi, Jinglue Xu, Jialong Li, Hitoshi Iba
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

The Ephemeral Cost of Switching Optimizers Across LLM Training Stages

The study investigates whether switching optimizers between pretraining and subsequent training stages of large language models (LLMs) incurs a performance penalty. By pretraining 1.2B Llama‑3 models with varying proportions of AdamW and Muon updates, and interpolating between the two during continued pretraining and supervised fine‑tuning (SFT), the authors find little evidence of a meaningful optimizer mismatch penalty. The results show that final performance is largely determined by the independent effects of the pretraining and post‑training optimizers, with downstream performance generally improving as the proportion of Muon updates during SFT increases, and that Muon remains competitive with AdamW even for task‑general SFT on larger models.

By Xinyu Zhao, Davis Wertheimer, Ashutosh Sharma, Rameswar Panda, Paul Pu Liang