arXiv:2602. 03685v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) is computationally expensive, partly because the loss exhibits slow power-law convergence whose origin remains debatable.
By Yizhou Liu, Ziming Liu, Cengiz Pehlevan, Jeff Gore
arXiv:2410. 24050v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale pretraining of transformers has been central to the success of foundation models.
By Ambroise Odonnat, Wassim Bouaziz, Vivien Cabannes
arXiv:2606. 00888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) offers a promising paradigm for improving the training and inference efficiency of deep neural networks; however, we find that in large language model training, DST can suffer from optimization instability, manifested as loss spikes after topology updates.
By Qiao Xiao, Boqian Wu, Patrik Okanovic, Tomasz Sternal, Maurice van Keulen, Elena Mocanu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Torsten Hoefler
Deep neural networks can exhibit periodic loss spikes known as the "Slingshot Mechanism" during long‑term training. This paper shows that such spikes arise from finite‑precision floating‑point arithmetic: when the correct‑class logit becomes much larger than the others, the gradient for that class is rounded to zero while others remain nonzero, breaking the zero‑sum constraint and creating a positive feedback loop that inflates feature and classifier norms. The authors term this Numerical Feature Inflation (NFI) and demonstrate that it explains the rapid norm growth, reappearance of gradients, and loss spikes, while also showing that partial absorption can still cause hidden norm growth without visible spikes.
By Hanqing Liu, Jianjun Cao, Yuanze Li, Zijian Zhou
arXiv:2607. 00510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowing which training examples drive outputs is fundamental to auditing, correcting, and understanding language models, yet for modern LLMs this remains expensive, approximate, and largely post-hoc.
By Dan Ley, Giang Nguyen, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julius Adebayo
arXiv:2607. 27731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep learning typically keeps the batch size static throughout training, thus overlooking the joint effect of learning rate and batch size on the training dynamics.
By Jiaxiang Li, Zhiqi Bu, Shiyun Xu