arXiv AI By Dushyant Rajput (AltSlate Labs LLP), Nirdesh Chauhan (AltSlate Labs LLP), Siddharth Kosaraju (AltSlate Labs LLP)

Depth and Scale in the Sub-150M Regime: JugnuLM-53M vs JugnuLM-110M

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Train What You Deploy: Closing the MLP Reachability Gap in Low-Rank Clone Distillation

The paper introduces a new approach to low‑rank clone distillation that ensures the student model’s training targets exactly the weights it will use at inference. By redefining the training objective to cover the full deployed matrix—without changing the model’s shape, parameter count, or FLOPs—the authors recover previously unreachable linear degrees of freedom. This results in significant performance gains across multiple teacher models, achieving comparable or superior accuracy with fewer tokens and parameters.

By Wenhui Chen, Zhifeng Li, Jie Zhou, Navan Preet Singh, Madalina Ciobanu, Chenghua Wang, Qingqing Mao, Ritankar Das
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
Jun 3

MuLoCo: Muon is a practical inner optimizer for DiLoCo

arXiv:2505. 23725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints.

By Benjamin Th\'erien, Xiaolong Huang, Aaron Defazio, Irina Rish, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv AI
Jun 12

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

arXiv:2606. 12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines.

By Franz Louis Cesista, Katherine Crowson, C\'edric Simal, Stella Biderman