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Paper · 2503.12811 · 2025

A Multi-Power Law for Loss Curve Prediction Across Learning Rate Schedules

arXiv · PDF · Open in the Atlas

Code that ran

We lifted 9 functions out of this paper's own repositories and ran 7 of them in a sandbox. "Ran" means the function executed on a synthesized input and returned a value. It is not a reproduction of the paper's results.

RepositoryRoleRan
thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw canonical 7 of 9
FunctionStatusWhere it lives
const_lrs Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/lr_schedules.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("0f6305535337d38c")
cosine_lrs Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/lr_schedules.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("00660cbc28acb453")
generate_init_params Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/fitting.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("cd6f7ee1b324e473")
huber_loss Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/utils.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("72abd9f687e8eaaa")
preprocess_data Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/utils.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("2e1fc14a90913b68")
torch_huber Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/utils.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("68cfdcc1f7b3559f")
two_stage_lrs Ran thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/lr_schedules.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("bf5b813192b4d050")
initialize_params Not yet run thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/fitting.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("f787cc931f766988")
load_data Not yet run thu-yao-01-luo/multipowerlaw/src/data_loader.py
code served (permissive licence) · get_code("57b2ae61ea02dcf2")

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Abstract

Training large models is both resource-intensive and time-consuming, making it crucial to understand the quantitative relationship between model performance and hyperparameters. In this paper, we present an empirical law that describes how the pretraining loss of large language models evolves under different learning rate schedules, such as constant, cosine, and step decay schedules. Our proposed law takes a multi-power form, combining a power law based on the sum of learning rates and additional power laws to account for a loss reduction effect induced by learning rate decay. We extensively validate this law on various model sizes and architectures, and demonstrate that after fitting on a few learning rate schedules, the law accurately predicts the loss curves for unseen schedules of different shapes and horizons. Moreover, by minimizing the predicted final pretraining loss across learning rate schedules, we are able to find a schedule that outperforms the widely used cosine learning rate schedule. Interestingly, this automatically discovered schedule bears some resemblance to the recently proposed Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) schedule (Hu et al, 2024) but achieves a slightly lower final loss. We believe these results could offer valuable insights for understanding the dynamics of pretraining and designing learning rate schedules to improve efficiency.

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