arXiv AI By Kaiyue Wen, David Hall, Tengyu Ma, Percy Liang

Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper evaluates ten deep learning optimizers across models ranging from 0.1B to 1.2B parameters and varying data-to-model ratios, highlighting that fair comparisons require rigorous hyperparameter tuning and end-of-training evaluations. It finds that claimed speedups over AdamW are lower than advertised, dropping to only 1.1× for the largest models, and that intermediate checkpoint comparisons can mislead due to learning‑rate decay. The study shows that matrix‑based optimizers like Muon and Soap achieve the highest speedups, but these benefits diminish as model size increases.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

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