Pythia releases 16 identically trained LLMs with full checkpoints and data tools to study training dynamics, scaling, memorization, and bias in language models.
hub Canonical reference
Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour
Canonical reference. 82% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
Deep learning thrives with large neural networks and large datasets. However, larger networks and larger datasets result in longer training times that impede research and development progress. Distributed synchronous SGD offers a potential solution to this problem by dividing SGD minibatches over a pool of parallel workers. Yet to make this scheme efficient, the per-worker workload must be large, which implies nontrivial growth in the SGD minibatch size. In this paper, we empirically show that on the ImageNet dataset large minibatches cause optimization difficulties, but when these are addressed the trained networks exhibit good generalization. Specifically, we show no loss of accuracy when training with large minibatch sizes up to 8192 images. To achieve this result, we adopt a hyper-parameter-free linear scaling rule for adjusting learning rates as a function of minibatch size and develop a new warmup scheme that overcomes optimization challenges early in training. With these simple techniques, our Caffe2-based system trains ResNet-50 with a minibatch size of 8192 on 256 GPUs in one hour, while matching small minibatch accuracy. Using commodity hardware, our implementation achieves ~90% scaling efficiency when moving from 8 to 256 GPUs. Our findings enable training visual recognition models on internet-scale data with high efficiency.
hub tools
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
claims ledger
- abstract Deep learning thrives with large neural networks and large datasets. However, larger networks and larger datasets result in longer training times that impede research and development progress. Distributed synchronous SGD offers a potential solution to this problem by dividing SGD minibatches over a pool of parallel workers. Yet to make this scheme efficient, the per-worker workload must be large, which implies nontrivial growth in the SGD minibatch size. In this paper, we empirically show that on the ImageNet dataset large minibatches cause optimization difficulties, but when these are address
co-cited works
representative citing papers
Masked autoencoders with asymmetric encoder-decoder and 75% masking ratio enable scalable self-supervised pre-training of vision transformers, achieving 87.8% ImageNet-1K accuracy with ViT-Huge using only unlabeled data.
Self-supervised ViTs show emergent semantic segmentation and 78.3% k-NN accuracy on ImageNet; DINO reaches 80.1% linear evaluation with ViT-Base.
LOSCAR-SGD combines local updates, sparse model averaging, and communication-computation overlap with a delay-corrected merge rule, providing convergence rates for smooth non-convex objectives under worker heterogeneity.
Ringmaster LMO extends delay-thresholding from ASGD to LMO-based momentum updates, providing convergence guarantees under (L0, L1)-smoothness and time-complexity bounds that recover optimal rates in the Euclidean case.
Inkheart SGD and M4 use bidirectional compression to achieve time complexities in distributed SGD that improve with worker count n and surpass prior lower bounds under a necessary structural assumption.
TENNOR enables efficient private training of wide neural networks in TEEs by recasting sparsification as doubly oblivious LSH retrievals and introducing MP-WTA to cut hash table memory by 50x while preserving accuracy.
A new injective multi-jet framework for RL flow control provides jet-count-independent running cost upper bounds and enables superior coordinated jet strategies, achieving drag suppression beyond symmetric ideals on cylinders and aerodynamic efficiency gains from 53% to 73% on airfoils.
Creates the BGTD benchmark and mmTraffic architecture to enable explainable multimodal interpretation of encrypted network traffic using LLMs.
FAERec fuses collaborative ID embeddings with LLM semantic embeddings using adaptive gating and dual-level alignment to enhance tail-item sequential recommendations.
Simulation study shows cold TLB misses in reverse address translation dominate latency for small collectives in multi-GPU pods, causing up to 1.4x degradation, while larger ones see diminishing returns.
FedBCGD reduces communication in federated learning by a factor of 1/N through block-wise parameter updates with accelerated convergence guarantees.
GNEP trains neuroevolution potentials with analytical gradients and Adam optimizer, cutting fitting time by orders of magnitude for Sb-Te systems while matching DFT accuracy on equation of state and radial distribution functions.
A recurrent-depth architecture enables language models to improve reasoning performance by iterating computation in latent space, achieving gains equivalent to much larger models on benchmarks.
Mini-batch SGD optimizes a different objective than full partial likelihood in Cox models, but the resulting mb-MPLE is still consistent with optimal rates for neural nets and asymptotic normality for linear models.
DeepSeek-V2 delivers top-tier open-source LLM performance using only 21B active parameters by compressing the KV cache 93.3% and cutting training costs 42.5% via MLA and DeepSeekMoE.
A promptable model trained on 1B masks achieves competitive zero-shot segmentation performance across tasks and is released publicly with its dataset.
DiTs achieve SOTA FID of 2.27 on ImageNet 256x256 by scaling transformer-based latent diffusion models, with performance improving consistently as Gflops increase.
OPT releases open decoder-only transformers up to 175B parameters that match GPT-3 performance at one-seventh the carbon cost, along with code and training logs.
VICReg prevents collapse in self-supervised image embeddings via explicit variance, invariance, and covariance regularization and matches state-of-the-art downstream performance.
SimCLR learns visual representations by contrasting augmented views of the same image and reaches 76.5% ImageNet top-1 accuracy with a linear classifier, matching a supervised ResNet-50.
Intra-layer model parallelism in PyTorch enables training of 8.3B-parameter transformers, achieving SOTA perplexity of 10.8 on WikiText103 and 66.5% accuracy on LAMBADA.
Switchable Normalization learns per-layer weights to combine channel, layer, and minibatch normalizers, claiming robustness to batch size and better results than fixed normalizers on ImageNet, COCO, CityScapes, ADE20K, MegaFace, and Kinetics.
To achieve robustness to adaptive adversaries, Bernoulli and reservoir sampling require sample size Ω(log |R| / ε²) instead of the static VC-dimension bound.
citing papers explorer
-
LOSCAR-SGD: Local SGD with Communication-Computation Overlap and Delay-Corrected Sparse Model Averaging
LOSCAR-SGD combines local updates, sparse model averaging, and communication-computation overlap with a delay-corrected merge rule, providing convergence rates for smooth non-convex objectives under worker heterogeneity.
-
Ringmaster LMO: Asynchronous Linear Minimization Oracle Momentum Method
Ringmaster LMO extends delay-thresholding from ASGD to LMO-based momentum updates, providing convergence guarantees under (L0, L1)-smoothness and time-complexity bounds that recover optimal rates in the Euclidean case.
-
Scalable Distributed Stochastic Optimization via Bidirectional Compression: Beyond Pessimistic Limits
Inkheart SGD and M4 use bidirectional compression to achieve time complexities in distributed SGD that improve with worker count n and surpass prior lower bounds under a necessary structural assumption.
-
TENNOR: Trustworthy Execution for Neural Networks through Obliviousness and Retrievals
TENNOR enables efficient private training of wide neural networks in TEEs by recasting sparsification as doubly oblivious LSH retrievals and introducing MP-WTA to cut hash table memory by 50x while preserving accuracy.
-
A Provably Robust Multi-Jet Framework applied to Active Flow Control of an Airfoil in Weakly Compressible Flow
A new injective multi-jet framework for RL flow control provides jet-count-independent running cost upper bounds and enables superior coordinated jet strategies, achieving drag suppression beyond symmetric ideals on cylinders and aerodynamic efficiency gains from 53% to 73% on airfoils.
-
Multimodal Reasoning with LLM for Encrypted Traffic Interpretation: A Benchmark
Creates the BGTD benchmark and mmTraffic architecture to enable explainable multimodal interpretation of encrypted network traffic using LLMs.
-
Fusion and Alignment Enhancement with Large Language Models for Tail-item Sequential Recommendation
FAERec fuses collaborative ID embeddings with LLM semantic embeddings using adaptive gating and dual-level alignment to enhance tail-item sequential recommendations.
-
Analyzing Reverse Address Translation Overheads in Multi-GPU Scale-Up Pods
Simulation study shows cold TLB misses in reverse address translation dominate latency for small collectives in multi-GPU pods, causing up to 1.4x degradation, while larger ones see diminishing returns.
-
FedBCD:Communication-Efficient Accelerated Block Coordinate Gradient Descent for Federated Learning
FedBCGD reduces communication in federated learning by a factor of 1/N through block-wise parameter updates with accelerated convergence guarantees.
-
PixelU: A U-Shaped Transformer for Efficient End-to-End Pixel Diffusion
PixelU is a minimalist U-shaped Diffusion Transformer for pixel-space diffusion that decouples frequencies with zero-cost skip connections and constant-channel downsampling, outperforming baselines like JiT-G at 1/3 the compute cost with FID 1.63 on ImageNet 256x256.
-
Towards Efficient LLMs Annealing with Principled Sample Selection
DiReCT reformulates LLM annealing sample selection as a constrained optimization problem that enforces per-sample gradient directions aligned with the loss landscape's curvature.
-
Neural Collapse by Design: Learning Class Prototypes on the Hypersphere
Supervised classification reaches neural collapse by design via normalized prototype losses on the hypersphere, outperforming CE and SCL on ImageNet-1K and other benchmarks with faster convergence and better transfer.
-
Rescaled Asynchronous SGD: Optimal Distributed Optimization under Data and System Heterogeneity
Rescaled ASGD recovers convergence to the true global objective by rescaling worker stepsizes proportional to computation times, matching the known time lower bound in the leading term under non-convex smoothness and bounded heterogeneity.
-
Hypernetworks for Dynamic Feature Selection
Hyper-DFS uses hypernetworks and Set Transformers to generate on-demand parameters for feature subsets in dynamic selection, outperforming prior methods on tabular data and showing stronger zero-shot generalization.
-
OrScale: Orthogonalised Optimization with Layer-Wise Trust-Ratio Scaling
OrScale adds a Frobenius-norm trust-ratio layer-wise scaler to Muon’s orthogonalized updates, with per-layer calibration for language models, yielding higher CIFAR-10 accuracy and better language-model pre-training loss than Muon+Moonlight and AdamW.
-
Parameter-Efficient Adaptation of Pre-Trained Vision Foundation Models for Active and Passive Seismic Data Denoising
Adapting vision foundation models with LoRA and kurtosis-guided unsupervised test-time adaptation matches or exceeds domain-specific models for seismic denoising across multiple sites and unseen data.
-
Dynamic Cluster Data Sampling for Efficient and Long-Tail-Aware Vision-Language Pre-training
DynamiCS dynamically scales semantic clusters per training epoch to reduce VLM pre-training compute while improving accuracy on long-tail concepts compared to static or flattening baselines.
-
COPUS: Co-adaptive Parallelism and Batch Size Selection in Large Language Model Training
COPUS co-adapts batch size and parallelism during LLM training via goodput to deliver 3.9-8% average faster convergence than fixing one while tuning the other.
-
CommFuse: Hiding Tail Latency via Communication Decomposition and Fusion for Distributed LLM Training
CommFuse eliminates tail latency in communication-computation overlap for distributed LLM training by decomposing collective operations into P2P communications and fusing them with fine-grained computation scheduling.
-
DASH-KV: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Asymmetric KV Cache Hashing
DASH-KV accelerates long-context LLM inference to linear complexity via asymmetric KV cache hashing and mixed-precision retention, matching full attention performance on LongBench.
-
MoEIoU: Rethinking Bounding-Box Regression as a Mixture of Experts
MoEIoU is a mixture-of-experts IoU loss using log-sum-exp aggregation and curriculum weighting that reports consistent gains over prior IoU losses on PASCAL VOC, HRIPCB, and MS COCO with YOLO models.
-
Orion: Enabling Self-adaptive Memory Management for On-device Online Continual Learning
Orion is a self-adaptive memory management framework for on-device online continual learning that co-optimizes latency, plasticity, and stability via URGE-based reallocation and prefetching.
-
Anytime Training with Schedule-Free Spectral Optimization
SF-NorMuon is a new schedule-free spectral optimizer that closes the gap with tuned AdamW on 125M-772M parameter models across 1-8x Chinchilla horizons while providing stationarity guarantees.
-
Fine-Tuning Without Forgetting via Loss-Adaptive Learning Rates
FINCH is a loss-adaptive learning-rate schedule that reduces forgetting by 93% on average during LLM fine-tuning while matching standard task performance across several benchmarks.
-
Information theoretic underpinning of self-supervised learning by clustering
SSL clustering is derived as KL-divergence optimization where a teacher-distribution constraint normalizes via inverse cluster priors and simplifies to batch centering by Jensen's inequality.
-
Multi-Narrow Transformation as a Single-Model Ensemble: Boundary Conditions, Mechanisms, and Failure Modes
Multi-narrow single-model ensembles outperform wide baselines in low-data image classification by learning diverse features but underperform in data-rich settings where training favors few paths.
-
Probing Routing-Conditional Calibration in Attention-Residual Transformers
Routing summaries and auxiliary features do not provide stable evidence of conditional miscalibration in AR transformers once confidence-matched baselines, capacity controls, and permutation nulls are applied.
-
Rennala MVR: Improved Time Complexity for Parallel Stochastic Optimization via Momentum-Based Variance Reduction
Rennala MVR improves time complexity over Rennala SGD for smooth nonconvex stochastic optimization in heterogeneous parallel systems under a mean-squared smoothness assumption.
-
Unleashing Scalable Context Parallelism for Foundation Models Pre-Training via FCP
FCP shards sequences at block level with flexible P2P communication and bin-packing to achieve near-linear scaling up to 256 GPUs and 1.13x-2.21x higher attention MFU in foundation model pre-training.
-
Trust, but Verify: Peeling Low-Bit Transformer Networks for Training Monitoring
A layer-wise peeling framework creates reference bounds to diagnose under-optimized layers in trained decoder-only transformers, including low-bit and quantized versions.
-
Lightweight Distillation of SAM 3 and DINOv3 for Edge-Deployable Individual-Level Livestock Monitoring and Longitudinal Visual Analytics
Distilled SAM 3 and DINOv3 models deliver near-teacher accuracy in pig tracking (92.29% MOTA, 96.15% IDF1) and behavior classification while achieving 7.77x parameter reduction and fitting on Jetson Orin NX with headroom.
-
In-context modeling as a retrain-free paradigm for foundation models in computational science
In-Context Modeling lets one trained model generalize across unseen materials, geometries, and conditions in computational physics by treating measurements as context for inference.
-
A Progressive Training Strategy for Vision-Language Models to Counteract Spatio-Temporal Hallucinations in Embodied Reasoning
A progressive training framework using spatiotemporal chain-of-thought data reduces the forward-backward temporal query performance gap in VLMs from over 70% to 6.53%.
-
Sampling Parallelism for Fast and Efficient Bayesian Learning
Sampling parallelism distributes Bayesian sample evaluations across GPUs for near-perfect scaling, lower memory use, and faster convergence via per-GPU data augmentations, outperforming pure data parallelism in diversity.
-
Accelerating Redshift-Conditioned Galaxy Image Synthesis with One-step Generative Modeling
One-step pixel-MeanFlow models recover key galaxy morphology statistics at orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost than standard DDPM sampling while remaining weaker on fine-grained structure.
-
Accelerated Gradient Descent for Faster Convergence with Minimal Overhead
CT-AGD accelerates first-order optimization in deep learning by using finite-difference curvature estimates and noise-mitigation heuristics, achieving equivalent accuracy with 33% fewer training epochs and overhead comparable to Adam.
-
MMCORE: MultiModal COnnection with Representation Aligned Latent Embeddings
MMCORE transfers VLM reasoning into diffusion-based image generation and editing via aligned latent embeddings from learnable queries, outperforming baselines on text-to-image and editing tasks.
-
There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning
A mechanics of the learning process is emerging in deep learning theory, characterized by dynamics, coarse statistics, and falsifiable predictions across idealized settings, limits, laws, hyperparameters, and universal behaviors.
- LionMuon: Alternating Spectral and Sign Descent for Efficient Training
- DistributedEstimator: Distributed Training of Quantum Neural Networks via Circuit Cutting