arXiv:2606. 01717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction tuning aligns large language models, including multimodal ones, with diverse user intents, but scaling to heterogeneous mixtures is hindered by gradient interference and bandwidth-heavy synchronization.
By Minsik Choi, Geewook Kim
arXiv:2606. 17526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient optimization is essential for training large language models.
By Da Chang, Ganzhao Yuan
arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.
By Alok Kumar Pandey, Umang Chaturvedi, Aatish Rana, Gopi Krishna Nedanuri
arXiv:2606. 25086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many modern Language Model (LM) pipelines return an averaged model, such as an exponential moving average of the training iterates, rather than the final iterate itself.
By Kwok Chun Au, Adam Block
The paper introduces COPC, a Coupled Off-Policy Correction method for asynchronous reinforcement learning of large language models. COPC coordinates policy-side and advantage-side corrections by combining token-level ratio masking with two-sided clipped-ratio weighting of TD residuals, addressing both policy mismatch and advantage staleness. Experiments show COPC outperforms existing asynchronous baselines on tool-integrated mathematical reasoning and search tasks, while maintaining training stability and minimal overhead.
By Zicheng Hu, Zhijian Zhou, Xuan Zhang, Yuchen Liu, Cheng Chen, Yuan Li, Qi Gu, Yan Feng, Hongyan Hao, Chao Qu
The paper introduces WHALE, a method that alternates between updating a language model’s weights and searching for a better harness (the code that manages context and control flow). By iteratively fine‑tuning the model under the current harness and then optimizing the harness under the updated model, WHALE improves performance across search QA, math reasoning, and chess puzzles, outperforming weight‑only, harness‑only, and Fast‑Slow Training by 4.15–24.38 percentage points in mean@8 accuracy. The approach uses either fixed phase lengths or an adaptive patience rule to decide when to switch phases, and the authors provide code on GitHub.
By Haechan Kim, Yoonho Lee, Gisang Lee, Chelsea Finn, Kangwook Lee