6 papers · 1 filter
(How) Learning Rates Regulate Catastrophic Overtraining
Mark Rofin, Aditya Varre, Nicolas Flammarion
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common first stage of LLM post-training, teaching the model to follow instructions and shaping its behavior as a helpful assistant. At the same ti…
Gradient Flow Polarizes Softmax Outputs towards Low-Entropy Solutions
Aditya Varre, Mark Rofin, Nicolas Flammarion
Understanding the intricate non-convex training dynamics of softmax-based models is crucial for explaining the empirical success of transformers. In this article, we analyze the gr…
Learning In-context n-grams with Transformers: Sub-n-grams Are Near-stationary Points
Aditya Varre, Gizem Yüce, Nicolas Flammarion
Motivated by empirical observations of prolonged plateaus and stage-wise progression during training, we investigate the loss landscape of transformer models trained on in-context…
Why Do We Need Weight Decay in Modern Deep Learning?
Francesco D'Angelo, Maksym Andriushchenko, Aditya Varre +1
Weight decay is a broadly used technique for training state-of-the-art deep networks from image classification to large language models. Despite its widespread usage and being exte…
Accelerated SGD for Non-Strongly-Convex Least Squares
Aditya Varre, Nicolas Flammarion
We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal…
Last iterate convergence of SGD for Least-Squares in the Interpolation regime
Aditya Varre, Loucas Pillaud-Vivien, Nicolas Flammarion
Motivated by the recent successes of neural networks that have the ability to fit the data perfectly and generalize well, we study the noiseless model in the fundamental least-squa…