Proposes equivariant optimizer updates matched to layer symmetries for embeddings, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE routers, with reported gains in validation loss and training stability on several language model architectures.
Memory-Efficient LLM Pretraining via Minimalist Optimizer Design
5 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
5
Pith papers citing it
abstract
Training large language models (LLMs) relies on adaptive optimizers such as Adam, which introduce extra operations and require significantly more memory to maintain first- and second-order moments than SGD. While recent works such as GaLore, Fira and APOLLO have proposed state-compressed memory-efficient variants, a fundamental question remains: What are the minimum modifications to plain SGD needed to match state-of-the-art pretraining performance? We systematically investigate this question using a bottom-up approach, and identify two simple yet highly (memory- and compute-) efficient techniques: (1) column-wise gradient normalization (normalizing the gradient along the output dimension), that boosts SGD performance without momentum; and (2) applying first-order momentum only to the output layer, where gradient variance is highest. Combining these two techniques lead to SCALE (Stochastic Column-normAlized Last-layer momEntum), a simple optimizer for memory efficient pretraining. Across multiple models (60M-1B), SCALE matches or exceeds the performance of Adam while using only 35-45% of the total memory. It also consistently outperforms memory-efficient optimizers such as GaLore, Fira and APOLLO, making it a strong candidate for large-scale pretraining under memory constraints. For LLaMA 7B, SCALE outperforms the state-of-the-art memory-efficient methods APOLLO and Muon in both perplexity and memory consumption.
citation-role summary
background 2
citation-polarity summary
verdicts
UNVERDICTED 5roles
background 2polarities
background 2representative citing papers
BAOC samples gradient streams to compute per-block risk metrics for cheap optimizer configs then solves a constrained optimization to minimize total risk under memory and time budgets while preserving training quality.
Manifold constraints via the new MACRO optimizer independently bound activation scales and enforce rotational equilibrium in LLM pre-training, subsuming RMS normalization and decoupled weight decay while delivering competitive performance with convergence guarantees.
MuonEq introduces pre-orthogonalization equilibration schemes that improve Muon optimizer performance during large language model pretraining.
Proposes low-rank orthogonalization and derives low-rank Muon and MSGD variants that outperform standard Muon on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining while providing iteration complexity bounds.
citing papers explorer
-
Low-rank Orthogonalization for Large-scale Matrix Optimization with Applications to Foundation Model Training
Proposes low-rank orthogonalization and derives low-rank Muon and MSGD variants that outperform standard Muon on GPT-2 and LLaMA pretraining while providing iteration complexity bounds.