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arXiv Machine Learning By Subhadip Mitra

When Is Availability-Aware Training Worth It? A Benchmark and Empirical Study of Interruption-Resilient Optimization Under Predictable Compute Schedules

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The paper introduces OrbitTrace, a benchmark of 50 physics‑grounded compute‑availability traces from satellite orbits, and investigates whether specialized interruption‑resilient optimizers are needed when training is interrupted by predictable compute gaps. Experiments on CIFAR‑10/ResNet‑18 and GPT‑2/AdamW show that a strong checkpoint‑and‑resume baseline that preserves full optimizer state and indexes learning‑rate schedules in effective time matches uninterrupted training, rendering most availability‑aware methods unnecessary. Only in a narrow regime—large models with non‑persistable optimizer state and frequent short pauses—does reactive adaptation recover a modest portion of the state‑loss penalty, and even this benefit disappears for eclipse‑scale gaps.

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