collaborators

7 papers

cs.LG2026

MuLoCo: Muon is a practical inner optimizer for DiLoCo

Benjamin Thérien, Xiaolong Huang, Aaron Defazio +2

DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints. Ho…

cs.LG2026

LO: Compute-Efficient Meta-Generalization of Learned Optimizers

Benjamin Thérien, Charles-Étienne Joseph, Boris Knyazev +3

Learned optimizers (LOs) have the potential to significantly reduce the wall-clock training time of neural networks. However, they can struggle to optimize unseen tasks (meta-gener…

cs.DC2026

Covenant-72B: Pre-Training a 72B LLM with Trustless Peers Over-the-Internet

Joel Lidin, Amir Sarfi, Erfan Miahi +6

Recently, there has been increased interest in globally distributed training, which has the promise to both reduce training costs and democratize participation in building large-sc…

cs.LG2025

Continual Pre-training of MoEs: How robust is your router?

Benjamin Thérien, Charles-Étienne Joseph, Zain Sarwar +7

Sparsely-activated Mixture of Experts (MoE) transformers are promising architectures for foundation models. Compared to dense transformers that require the same amount of floating-…

cs.LG2025

Overcoming the Communication-Performance Tradeoff in LLM Pretraining

Amir Sarfi, Benjamin Thérien, Joel Lidin +1

Communication-efficient distributed training algorithms (e.g., DiLoCo) have received considerable interest due to their benefits for training large language models (LLMs) in bandwi…

cs.LG2025

Beyond Cosine Decay: On the effectiveness of Infinite Learning Rate Schedule for Continual Pre-training

Vaibhav Singh, Paul Janson, Paria Mehrbod +4

The ever-growing availability of unlabeled data presents both opportunities and challenges for training artificial intelligence systems. While self-supervised learning (SSL) has em…