$μ$pscaling small models: Principled warm starts and hyperparameter transfer
Modern large-scale neural networks are often trained and released in multiple sizes to accommodate diverse inference budgets. To improve efficiency, recent work has explored model upscaling: initializing larger models from trained smaller ones to accelerate convergence. However, this method can be sensitive to hyperparameters that need to be tuned at the target upscaled model size, which is prohibitively costly to do directly. It remains unclear whether tuning hyperparameters on smaller models and extrapolating via scaling laws is sound in this setting. We address this with principled approaches to width-based upscaling and efficient hyperparameter tuning in this setting. Motivated by $μ$P and any-dimensional architectures, we introduce a general upscaling method that, like Net2Net, copies and perturbs weights, but uses theoretically grounded, width-dependent scalings for the perturbation noise and optimizer hyperparameters. First, we prove that under zero perturbation, the upscaled model is functionally equivalent to the base model throughout training. Second, we extend the $μ$P theory to enable infinite-width limit analysis and establish hyperparameter transfer for upscaled models, greatly reducing the tuning cost. We empirically demonstrate that this method is effective on realistic datasets and architectures.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Warm Start Marginal Likelihood Optimisation for Iterative Gaussian Processes
Gaussian processes are a versatile probabilistic machine learning model whose effectiveness often depends on good hyperparameters, which are typically learned by maximising the marginal likelihood. In this work, we consi…
Gaussian ProcessesSystematic Evaluation of Learning Rate Scheduling Strategies Across Heterogeneous Architectures
Choosing a learning rate scheduling strategy is critical to neural network training, but manual selection is costly and rarely exhaustive. While classical AutoML approaches often treat the scheduler as a secondary hyperp…
Preservation Is Not Enough for Width Growth: Regime-Sensitive Selection of Dense LM Warm Starts
Width expansion offers a practical route to reuse smaller causal-language-model checkpoints, but selecting a widened warm start is not solved by zero-step preservation alone. We study dense width growth as a candidate-se…
Why Warmup the Learning Rate? Underlying Mechanisms and Improvements
It is common in deep learning to warm up the learning rate $\eta$, often by a linear schedule between $\eta_{\text{init}} = 0$ and a predetermined target $\eta_{\text{trgt}}$. In this paper, we show through systematic ex…
Variational quantum simulation: a case study for understanding warm starts
The barren plateau phenomenon, characterized by loss gradients that vanish exponentially with system size, poses a challenge to scaling variational quantum algorithms. Here we explore the potential of warm starts, whereb…