arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

EGGROLL, Unrolled: Understanding and Improving Low-Rank Evolution Strategies at Scale

EGGROLL replaces dense Gaussian perturbations in evolution strategies with low‑rank Gaussian products, enabling practical optimization of large language models while maintaining exactness on quadratic objectives. The paper analyzes the mean update field, error bounds, and shows that rank‑one perturbations add only a small variance penalty compared to dense ES. A new leave‑one‑out estimator, LOO‑ROLL, further reduces estimator MSE and improves post‑training performance on transformer blocks and GSM8K accuracy.

By Ege C. Kaya, Abolfazl Hashemi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Oct 29

The Precision Wall: An Optimizer-Dependent Boundary for Optimization under Power-Law Measurement Spectra

In low-rank matrix sensing of a rank-$D$ factor $U^\ast \in \mathbb{R}^{V \times D}$, replacing isotropic Gaussian designs with power-law measurement covariance $Σ= \mathrm{diag}(j^{-s})_{j=1}^V$ leaves the Burer--Monteiro landscape free of spurious local minima, yet division-normalised first-order optimizers stall above a critical exponent $s^\ast$. We trace this failure to a numerical precision wall.