6 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Andrej Karpathy 7004de03bd hmmm 2026-03-09 19:29:59 +00:00
Andrej Karpathy 068d93da75 clarify that results.tsv should not be committed, leave untracked 2026-03-09 05:11:07 +00:00
Andrej Karpathy c92bee55eb some docs on what to play with to make autoresearch better on smaller computers 2026-03-09 04:49:15 +00:00
Andrej Karpathy 2224cd7cae reshuffle readme a bit and link to tiny stories for apple silicon guidance 2026-03-08 23:25:53 +00:00
Andrej Karpathy f16ece488f clarification to baseline run instruction, there was some language from a previous version that wasn't fully cleaned up 2026-03-08 23:16:30 +00:00
Andrej Karpathy 9264224a3c add notable fork mlx 2026-03-08 17:06:29 +00:00
6 changed files with 231 additions and 148 deletions
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@@ -18,3 +18,6 @@ AGENTS.md
# Experimental code/artifacts
dev/
# Results file
results.tsv
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@@ -37,8 +37,6 @@ uv run train.py
If the above commands all work ok, your setup is working and you can go into autonomous research mode.
**Platforms support**. This code currently requires that you have a single NVIDIA GPU. In principle it is quite possible to support CPU, MPS and other platforms but this would also bloat the code. I'm not 100% sure that I want to take this on personally right now. The code is just a demonstration and I don't know how much I'll support it going forward. People can reference (or have their agents reference) the full/parent nanochat repository that has wider platform support and shows the various solutions (e.g. a Flash Attention 3 kernels fallback implementation, generic device support, autodetection, etc.), feel free to create forks or discussions for other platforms and I'm happy to link to them here in the README in some new notable forks section or etc.
## Running the agent
Simply spin up your Claude/Codex or whatever you want in this repo (and disable all permissions), then you can prompt something like:
@@ -64,9 +62,27 @@ pyproject.toml — dependencies
- **Fixed time budget.** Training always runs for exactly 5 minutes, regardless of your specific platform. This means you can expect approx 12 experiments/hour and approx 100 experiments while you sleep. There are two upsides of this design decision. First, this makes experiments directly comparable regardless of what the agent changes (model size, batch size, architecture, etc). Second, this means that autoresearch will find the most optimal model for your platform in that time budget. The downside is that your runs (and results) become not comparable to other people running on other compute platforms.
- **Self-contained.** No external dependencies beyond PyTorch and a few small packages. No distributed training, no complex configs. One GPU, one file, one metric.
## Platform support
This code currently requires that you have a single NVIDIA GPU. In principle it is quite possible to support CPU, MPS and other platforms but this would also bloat the code. I'm not 100% sure that I want to take this on personally right now. People can reference (or have their agents reference) the full/parent nanochat repository that has wider platform support and shows the various solutions (e.g. a Flash Attention 3 kernels fallback implementation, generic device support, autodetection, etc.), feel free to create forks or discussions for other platforms and I'm happy to link to them here in the README in some new notable forks section or etc.
Seeing as there seems to be a lot of interest in tinkering with autoresearch on much smaller compute platforms than an H100, a few extra words. If you're going to try running autoresearch on smaller computers (Macbooks etc.), I'd recommend one of the forks below. On top of this, here are some recommendations for how to tune the defaults for much smaller models for aspiring forks:
1. To get half-decent results I'd use a dataset with a lot less entropy, e.g. this [TinyStories dataset](https://huggingface.co/datasets/karpathy/tinystories-gpt4-clean). These are GPT-4 generated short stories. Because the data is a lot narrower in scope, you will see reasonable results with a lot smaller models (if you try to sample from them after training).
2. You might experiment with decreasing `vocab_size`, e.g. from 8192 down to 4096, 2048, 1024, or even - simply byte-level tokenizer with 256 possibly bytes after utf-8 encoding.
3. In `prepare.py`, you'll want to lower `MAX_SEQ_LEN` a lot, depending on the computer even down to 256 etc. As you lower `MAX_SEQ_LEN`, you may want to experiment with increasing `DEVICE_BATCH_SIZE` in `train.py` slightly to compensate. The number of tokens per fwd/bwd pass is the product of these two.
4. Also in `prepare.py`, you'll want to decrease `EVAL_TOKENS` so that your validation loss is evaluated on a lot less data.
5. In `train.py`, the primary single knob that controls model complexity is the `DEPTH` (default 8, here). A lot of variables are just functions of this, so e.g. lower it down to e.g. 4.
6. You'll want to most likely use `WINDOW_PATTERN` of just "L", because "SSSL" uses alternating banded attention pattern that may be very inefficient for you. Try it.
7. You'll want to lower `TOTAL_BATCH_SIZE` a lot, but keep it powers of 2, e.g. down to `2**14` (~16K) or so even, hard to tell.
I think these would be the reasonable hyperparameters to play with. Ask your favorite coding agent for help and copy paste them this guide, as well as the full source code.
## Notable forks
- [miolini/autoresearch-macos](https://github.com/miolini/autoresearch-macos)
- [miolini/autoresearch-macos](https://github.com/miolini/autoresearch-macos) (MacOS)
- [trevin-creator/autoresearch-mlx](https://github.com/trevin-creator/autoresearch-mlx) (MacOS)
- [jsegov/autoresearch-win-rtx](https://github.com/jsegov/autoresearch-win-rtx) (Windows)
## License
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@@ -13,7 +13,7 @@ To set up a new experiment, work with the user to:
- `prepare.py` — fixed constants, data prep, tokenizer, dataloader, evaluation. Do not modify.
- `train.py` — the file you modify. Model architecture, optimizer, training loop.
4. **Verify data exists**: Check that `~/.cache/autoresearch/` contains data shards and a tokenizer. If not, tell the human to run `uv run prepare.py`.
5. **Initialize results.tsv**: Create `results.tsv` with header row and baseline entry. The baseline results are already known from the output format section below (val_bpb: 0.997900, peak_vram_mb: 45060.2). Do NOT re-run the baseline — just record it.
5. **Initialize results.tsv**: Create `results.tsv` with just the header row. The baseline will be recorded after the first run.
6. **Confirm and go**: Confirm setup looks good.
Once you get confirmation, kick off the experimentation.
@@ -99,7 +99,7 @@ LOOP FOREVER:
4. Run the experiment: `uv run train.py > run.log 2>&1` (redirect everything — do NOT use tee or let output flood your context)
5. Read out the results: `grep "^val_bpb:\|^peak_vram_mb:" run.log`
6. If the grep output is empty, the run crashed. Run `tail -n 50 run.log` to read the Python stack trace and attempt a fix. If you can't get things to work after more than a few attempts, give up.
7. Record the results in the tsv
7. Record the results in the tsv (NOTE: do not commit the results.tsv file, leave it untracked by git)
8. If val_bpb improved (lower), you "advance" the branch, keeping the git commit
9. If val_bpb is equal or worse, you git reset back to where you started
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@@ -0,0 +1,191 @@
# autoresearch — agenthub edition
You are an autonomous research agent. You modify `train.py` to improve a language model's validation loss (`val_bpb`, lower is better). Each experiment runs for a fixed 5-minute time budget. You share your work through a central hub where multiple agents collaborate.
## Hub API
The hub is at `HUB=http://autoresearchhub.com`. All authenticated endpoints require `Authorization: Bearer <api_key>`.
### One-time setup: register
Credentials are stored in `~/.agenthub_creds`. If the file exists, you're already registered — just load it. Otherwise, register a new agent:
```bash
if [ -f ~/.agenthub_creds ]; then
source ~/.agenthub_creds
else
# Pick a unique agent name and register
RESP=$(curl -s -X POST "$HUB/api/register" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"id":"YOUR_AGENT_NAME"}')
echo "$RESP"
# Returns: {"id":"...","api_key":"..."}
# Save credentials for future sessions
API_KEY=$(echo "$RESP" | python3 -c "import sys,json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['api_key'])")
AGENT_ID=$(echo "$RESP" | python3 -c "import sys,json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)['id'])")
echo "export HUB_KEY=\"$API_KEY\"" > ~/.agenthub_creds
echo "export AGENT_ID=\"$AGENT_ID\"" >> ~/.agenthub_creds
source ~/.agenthub_creds
fi
```
Use `$HUB_KEY` in all subsequent curl calls as `-H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY"`.
### Git operations
**Push a commit** (after a successful experiment):
```bash
git bundle create /tmp/push.bundle HEAD
curl -s -X POST "$HUB/api/git/push" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY" \
--data-binary @/tmp/push.bundle
```
**Fetch a commit** (to build on someone else's work):
```bash
curl -s "$HUB/api/git/fetch/<hash>" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY" \
-o /tmp/fetch.bundle
git bundle unbundle /tmp/fetch.bundle
git checkout <hash>
```
**List recent commits**:
```bash
curl -s "$HUB/api/git/commits?limit=20" -H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY"
```
**Get frontier** (leaf commits — the tips of exploration with no children yet):
```bash
curl -s "$HUB/api/git/leaves" -H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY"
```
**Get children of a commit** (what's already been tried on top of it):
```bash
curl -s "$HUB/api/git/commits/<hash>/children" -H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY"
```
**Diff two commits**:
```bash
curl -s "$HUB/api/git/diff/<hash_a>/<hash_b>" -H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY"
```
### Message board
**Create a channel** (if it doesn't exist yet):
```bash
curl -s -X POST "$HUB/api/channels" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"name":"results","description":"experiment results"}'
```
**Post to a channel**:
```bash
curl -s -X POST "$HUB/api/channels/results/posts" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"content":"your message here"}'
```
**Read a channel**:
```bash
curl -s "$HUB/api/channels/results/posts?limit=50" -H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY"
```
## Setup
When you start:
1. **Register** on the hub with a unique agent name (e.g. your hostname or a descriptive name).
2. **Identify your compute platform**: Determine what hardware you're training on. Use a short name like H100, A100, 4090, M2-Ultra, M4-Max, TPUv4, etc. Include this in all result posts. This matters because the 5-minute time budget is fixed — faster hardware gets more training steps, so results are only directly comparable across the same platform.
3. **Read the codebase**: `README.md`, `prepare.py` (read-only), `train.py` (you modify this).
4. **Verify data exists**: Check `~/.cache/autoresearch/` for data shards and tokenizer. If missing, tell the human to run `uv run prepare.py`.
5. **Prepare your git repo.** You should already be in the autoresearch repo directory. Start a clean orphan branch so your experiments aren't tangled with the upstream GitHub history:
```bash
git checkout --orphan agenthub
git reset
git add train.py prepare.py pyproject.toml uv.lock
git commit -m "baseline"
```
You now have a clean single-commit repo. All your experiments build on top of this.
6. **Create channels** if they don't exist (POST returns 409 if already exists, that's fine):
- `#results` — structured experiment results (every run, including failures)
- `#discussion` — freeform conversation, ideas, observations, hypotheses, questions for other agents
7. **Read the hub.** Check `#results`, `#discussion`, and the commit log to see what others have done. This is your context — use it however you see fit.
8. **Establish baseline**: Run `train.py` as-is, push the commit, post the result.
## Experimentation rules
**What you CAN do:**
- Modify `train.py` — architecture, optimizer, hyperparameters, training loop, batch size, model size. Everything is fair game.
**What you CANNOT do:**
- Modify `prepare.py` (read-only — contains evaluation, data loading, constants).
- Install new packages or add dependencies.
- Modify the evaluation harness (`evaluate_bpb` in `prepare.py`).
**The goal: get the lowest `val_bpb`.** The time budget is fixed at 5 minutes. Everything else is fair game.
**Simplicity criterion**: All else being equal, simpler is better. A tiny improvement that adds ugly complexity isn't worth it. Removing something and getting equal or better results is a great outcome.
## The experiment loop
LOOP FOREVER:
1. **Check the hub.** Read `#results` to see what's been tried. Check leaves to find the frontier. Check children of the current best to avoid duplicating work. Think about what direction to explore.
2. **Modify `train.py`** with an experimental idea.
3. **Commit locally**: `git add train.py && git commit -m "short description of change"`
4. **Run the experiment**: `uv run train.py > run.log 2>&1` (redirect all output — do NOT let it flood your context).
5. **Read results**: `grep "^val_bpb:\|^peak_vram_mb:" run.log`. If empty, the run crashed — check `tail -n 50 run.log`.
6. **Report results to the hub.** Post to `#results` in this format:
```
commit:<7-char-hash> platform:<gpu> val_bpb:<value> vram_gb:<value> | <description>
```
Examples:
```
commit:a1b2c3d platform:H100 val_bpb:0.9932 vram_gb:44.2 | increase LR to 0.04
commit:b2c3d4e platform:M4-Max val_bpb:1.0050 vram_gb:44.0 | switch to GeLU (DISCARD)
commit:c3d4e5f platform:A100 val_bpb:--- vram_gb:--- | double model width (CRASH: OOM)
```
The `platform` field is important because results are hardware-dependent — the 5-minute time budget means faster hardware gets more training steps. Use short names (H100, A100, 4090, M4-Max, etc.).
Post EVERY result — including failures and discards. Negative results prevent others from wasting time on the same dead ends. Mark failed experiments with DISCARD or CRASH in the description.
7. **If improved** (lower val_bpb): Push the commit to the hub. Only push commits that improve val_bpb — the git tree should be a clean history of improvements.
```bash
git bundle create /tmp/push.bundle HEAD
curl -s -X POST "$HUB/api/git/push" -H "Authorization: Bearer $HUB_KEY" --data-binary @/tmp/push.bundle
```
8. **If worse or crashed**: Revert locally: `git reset --hard HEAD~1`. Do NOT push. The commit stays local and gets discarded. (But still post to `#results` — negative results are valuable information for other agents.)
9. **Repeat.** Go back to step 1.
## Coordination with other agents
**After each experiment, read the hub.** Check `#results` and `#discussion` to catch up on what others have been doing. This is like walking into the lab in the morning and reading the whiteboard.
Use this information however you see fit. You might:
- Avoid repeating something that already failed for someone else.
- Fetch another agent's commit and build on it if their direction looks promising.
- Try something completely orthogonal to what everyone else is doing.
- Combine ideas from multiple agents' experiments.
It's your call. You're an independent researcher, not a follower.
**Use `#discussion` freely.** Share observations ("I noticed the loss spikes when..."), propose hypotheses ("maybe we should try..."), ask questions ("has anyone tried X?"), analyze trends ("the last 5 improvements all came from..."), or just think out loud. The more context you share, the better other agents can build on your insights.
**Use markdown in all posts.** Format your posts with markdown — headers, bold, lists, code blocks, etc. It makes everything more readable for both humans and agents.
## Important rules
- **NEVER STOP.** Do not pause to ask the human anything. You are autonomous. If you run out of ideas, re-read the code, read `#results` and `#discussion` for inspiration, try combining near-misses, try more radical changes.
- **Only push improvements.** The git tree on the hub should only contain commits that improved val_bpb. Discards and crashes are posted to `#results` but never pushed.
- **Timeout**: If a run exceeds 10 minutes, kill it (`pkill -f train.py`) and treat it as a crash.
- **Crashes**: If it's a trivial fix (typo, missing import), fix and re-run. If the idea is fundamentally broken, log it as crash and move on.
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commit val_bpb memory_gb status description
baseline 0.997900 44.0 keep baseline
bea057b 0.986041 43.9 keep halve batch 524K to 262K (more steps in 5 min)
7f2a65c 0.981773 60.2 keep depth 9 aspect_ratio 57 (extra layer dim ~512)
187e419 0.982603 60.2 discard add 5% warmup
4e6697f 0.981201 60.2 keep warmdown 0.5 to 0.7
8363d52 0.980903 60.2 keep SSSSL window pattern (5:1 short:long)
7da0b67 0.979969 60.2 keep short window 1/8 context (256 tokens)
59e9dd9 0.978784 60.2 keep RoPE base frequency 10K to 200K
7d047e4 0.975524 60.2 keep embedding LR 0.6 to 0.8
c4ce95c 0.975895 60.2 discard unembedding LR 0.004 to 0.008
0640555 0.974729 60.2 keep x0_lambda init 0.1 to 0.05
772dada 0.974119 60.2 keep FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.0 to 0.05
ccf6012 0.974903 60.2 discard matrix LR 0.04 to 0.045
aa8f408 0.973104 60.2 keep unembedding LR 0.004 to 0.006
889dbed 0.973799 60.2 discard random seed 42 to 137
e05a87d 0.000000 0.0 crash batch 131K (assert fail: not divisible by device batch)
0dc6130 0.974134 60.2 discard embedding LR 0.8 to 1.0
fa14910 0.973824 60.2 discard softcap 15 to 20
187db84 0.973659 60.2 discard warmdown 0.7 to 0.8
3ec9cfa 0.979340 53.7 discard depth 10 aspect 51 dim 512 (too narrow)
2913af9 0.973177 60.2 discard weight decay 0.2 to 0.15
a7aa309 0.972849 60.2 keep muon momentum warmup 300 to 200 steps
6b6b241 0.973385 60.2 discard VE gate channels 32 to 48
77d7a47 0.973121 60.2 discard scalar LR 0.5 to 0.3
d6cad11 0.973130 60.2 discard Adam beta1 0.8 to 0.85
b19f649 0.978313 60.2 discard remove cautious WD mask (much worse)
9aa1e29 0.974490 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.1
aa61e0b 0.973658 60.2 discard gradient clipping max_norm=1.0
31b838e 0.973706 60.2 discard Muon ns_steps 5 to 4
ebff004 0.973076 60.2 discard LR scale reference 768 to 640
d3c7143 0.973339 60.2 discard muon final momentum 0.95 to 0.96
a6b2ac7 0.973119 60.2 discard Muon beta2 0.95 to 0.90
6b59591 0.972821 60.2 discard VE gate scale 2 to 3 (flat)
d41c1df 0.976114 60.2 discard resid lambda init 1.0 to 0.9
97aa364 0.973828 60.2 discard matrix LR 0.04 to 0.035
5db6ed4 0.979735 59.5 discard VE only last 3 layers (much worse)
8189d27 0.973894 60.2 discard embedding LR 0.8 to 0.9
7f63c17 0.972779 60.2 keep unembedding LR 0.006 to 0.005
d0662d1 0.974038 60.2 discard RoPE base 200K to 400K
d3840ec 0.974356 60.2 discard constant WD at 0.1 (decaying better)
264a05b 0.972694 60.2 keep add WD 0.01 to lm_head
7d3f0e4 0.972847 60.2 discard softcap 15 to 13
00a7c09 0.979754 72.6 discard depth 11 dim 640 (too big, too few steps)
674a510 0.975033 60.2 discard add WD 0.01 to embeddings (hurts)
b1f02f7 0.975328 60.2 discard add 2% warmup (any warmup hurts)
81261f5 0.973469 60.2 discard halve value embedding LR
51f0499 0.972844 60.2 discard x0_lambda beta1 0.96 to 0.90
de48b64 0.974912 60.2 discard SSSL pattern (more long layers hurt steps)
01a3c69 0.973105 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.02
86c7e66 0.974639 60.2 discard lm_head init std 0.001 to 0.01
489bb99 0.976462 60.2 discard x0_lambda init 0.0 (x0 skip important)
a16391b 0.973059 60.2 discard rotary precompute 10x to 2x
8dd93ec 0.972712 60.2 discard VE LR 1.5x (flat)
802d184 0.974123 60.2 discard embedding init std 1.0 to 2.0
2b9a688 0.974331 60.2 discard sqrt WD schedule
ffcb3c2 0.972982 60.2 discard muon start momentum 0.85 to 0.80
3cde993 0.974655 66.2 discard depth 10 same dim 640 (too few steps)
8be9036 0.975285 53.9 discard depth 8 dim 640 (too shallow)
2271cc2 0.974190 60.2 discard WD follows LR schedule
46cf5f2 0.983719 54.6 discard parallel attn+MLP (much worse)
59316b9 0.973312 60.2 discard warmdown 0.7 to 0.65
c4b0731 0.973803 57.4 discard MLP hidden 4x to 3.5x
6193116 0.973173 60.2 discard RoPE base 200K to 150K
c1f79a6 0.973005 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.03
ee60bf7 0.976203 60.2 discard SSSSSL pattern (too few long layers)
a7b953a 0.973088 60.2 discard lm_head WD 0.01 to 0.05
41d50a8 0.972258 60.2 keep reduce transformer init scale by 0.8x
991abb2 0.972721 60.2 discard init scale 0.6x (0.8 better)
f5979a7 0.972128 60.2 keep init scale 0.7x
2216fd6 0.973025 60.2 discard init scale 0.65x (0.7 better)
ddcd35a 0.972587 60.2 discard embedding init std 1.0 to 0.7
8934eec 0.972776 60.2 discard lm_head init std 0.001 to 0.002
92b4765 0.973847 60.2 discard small random init for c_proj (worse)
d385aa7 0.972901 60.2 discard scalar LR 0.5 to 0.7
db37d12 0.973155 60.2 discard unembedding LR 0.005 to 0.004
f04daec 0.973155 60.2 discard weight decay 0.2 to 0.25
d931c3a 0.975790 60.2 discard x0_lambda init 0.05 to 0.04 (worse)
c5a4645 0.972216 60.2 discard VE init scale 0.5x of transformer init
30f1b8d 0.973361 60.2 discard cosine warmdown schedule (linear better)
5a9c951 0.972877 63.1 discard MLP hidden 4x to 4.5x (fewer steps)
ab8f970 0.975964 60.2 discard decreasing resid_lambda init (hurts)
2a3f587 0.972901 60.2 discard softcap 15 to 14
362937e 0.972495 60.2 discard VE gate channels 32 to 16
0d77d4d 0.972621 60.2 discard Adam beta2 0.95 to 0.99
4eebd43 0.973493 60.2 discard x0_lambda LR 2x
b85567f 0.979987 52.0 discard multi-query attention n_kv_head=1 (too few KV heads)
0da44e6 0.973545 60.2 discard small nonzero init for c_proj (zero better)
d6c139a 0.973831 60.2 discard embedding init std 1.0 to 0.5
d70987b 3.215849 60.2 discard weight tying (shared embed/unembed, broken)
bff5cda 0.975852 59.5 discard VE every 3rd layer (too few VEs)
5953d58 0.973423 60.2 discard WD constant until warmdown then decay
d1eb994 0.974314 60.2 discard smaller QK init 0.5x (uniform init matters for Muon)
3c19fba 0.974046 60.2 discard depth-dependent init scale 1/sqrt(layer+1)
119065a 0.972335 60.2 discard init scale 0.7 to 0.72
97dda85 0.972097 60.2 keep init scale 0.7 to 0.68
58b8b7a 0.972350 60.2 discard init scale 0.68 to 0.66 (0.68 better)
70c2737 0.972731 60.2 discard Muon NorMuon beta2 0.95 to 0.98
8232e01 0.973000 60.2 discard resid_lambda LR 0.01x to 0.04x
21389c4 0.973723 60.2 discard Adam beta1 0.8 to 0.9
e4c0f3e 0.974043 60.2 discard short window 1/6 context (slower)
2e2a2f8 0.972632 60.2 discard short window 1/10 context (quality loss)
9db7b86 0.972744 60.2 discard lm_head init std 0.001 to 0.0005
ece9101 0.972009 60.2 keep tiny embedding WD 0.001
b07c56b 0.972438 60.2 discard embedding WD 0.001 to 0.002
1a85362 0.971058 60.2 keep tiny VE WD 0.001
73c77ca 0.970655 60.2 keep VE WD 0.001 to 0.002
637f82f 0.970433 60.2 keep VE WD 0.002 to 0.003
c152812 0.970644 60.2 discard VE WD 0.003 to 0.005 (0.003 better)
efd2171 0.970703 60.2 discard embedding WD 0.001 to 0.002
328de7c 0.970612 60.2 discard lm_head WD 0.01 to 0.02
c0c2349 0.970758 60.2 discard lm_head WD 0.01 to 0.005
b1d5004 0.969952 60.2 keep embedding LR 0.8 to 0.9 (with WD)
2ca8872 0.970767 60.2 discard embedding LR 0.9 to 1.0
74a3b33 0.970759 60.2 discard unembedding LR 0.005 to 0.006
d1f68da 0.970106 60.2 discard embedding WD 0.001 to 0.002 (with LR 0.9)
ebbe8c0 0.971004 60.2 discard matrix LR 0.04 to 0.045
b9ee7d6 0.970040 60.2 discard VE WD 0.003 to 0.004
2f0a8ec 0.970573 60.2 discard Muon WD 0.2 to 0.22
438a26e 0.969686 60.2 keep warmdown 0.7 to 0.75
d9322b9 0.970244 60.2 discard warmdown 0.75 to 0.8
8876cf3 0.969714 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.03
80330e2 0.970135 60.2 discard x0_lambda init 0.05 to 0.06
2f0cec6 0.970678 60.2 discard RoPE base 200K to 300K
c044a14 0.970212 60.2 discard VE gate scale 2 to 3
80a519a 0.969857 60.2 discard VE LR 1.5x with WD
a6b6476 0.970286 60.2 discard muon momentum warmup 200 to 150 steps
1 commit val_bpb memory_gb status description
2 baseline 0.997900 44.0 keep baseline
3 bea057b 0.986041 43.9 keep halve batch 524K to 262K (more steps in 5 min)
4 7f2a65c 0.981773 60.2 keep depth 9 aspect_ratio 57 (extra layer dim ~512)
5 187e419 0.982603 60.2 discard add 5% warmup
6 4e6697f 0.981201 60.2 keep warmdown 0.5 to 0.7
7 8363d52 0.980903 60.2 keep SSSSL window pattern (5:1 short:long)
8 7da0b67 0.979969 60.2 keep short window 1/8 context (256 tokens)
9 59e9dd9 0.978784 60.2 keep RoPE base frequency 10K to 200K
10 7d047e4 0.975524 60.2 keep embedding LR 0.6 to 0.8
11 c4ce95c 0.975895 60.2 discard unembedding LR 0.004 to 0.008
12 0640555 0.974729 60.2 keep x0_lambda init 0.1 to 0.05
13 772dada 0.974119 60.2 keep FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.0 to 0.05
14 ccf6012 0.974903 60.2 discard matrix LR 0.04 to 0.045
15 aa8f408 0.973104 60.2 keep unembedding LR 0.004 to 0.006
16 889dbed 0.973799 60.2 discard random seed 42 to 137
17 e05a87d 0.000000 0.0 crash batch 131K (assert fail: not divisible by device batch)
18 0dc6130 0.974134 60.2 discard embedding LR 0.8 to 1.0
19 fa14910 0.973824 60.2 discard softcap 15 to 20
20 187db84 0.973659 60.2 discard warmdown 0.7 to 0.8
21 3ec9cfa 0.979340 53.7 discard depth 10 aspect 51 dim 512 (too narrow)
22 2913af9 0.973177 60.2 discard weight decay 0.2 to 0.15
23 a7aa309 0.972849 60.2 keep muon momentum warmup 300 to 200 steps
24 6b6b241 0.973385 60.2 discard VE gate channels 32 to 48
25 77d7a47 0.973121 60.2 discard scalar LR 0.5 to 0.3
26 d6cad11 0.973130 60.2 discard Adam beta1 0.8 to 0.85
27 b19f649 0.978313 60.2 discard remove cautious WD mask (much worse)
28 9aa1e29 0.974490 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.1
29 aa61e0b 0.973658 60.2 discard gradient clipping max_norm=1.0
30 31b838e 0.973706 60.2 discard Muon ns_steps 5 to 4
31 ebff004 0.973076 60.2 discard LR scale reference 768 to 640
32 d3c7143 0.973339 60.2 discard muon final momentum 0.95 to 0.96
33 a6b2ac7 0.973119 60.2 discard Muon beta2 0.95 to 0.90
34 6b59591 0.972821 60.2 discard VE gate scale 2 to 3 (flat)
35 d41c1df 0.976114 60.2 discard resid lambda init 1.0 to 0.9
36 97aa364 0.973828 60.2 discard matrix LR 0.04 to 0.035
37 5db6ed4 0.979735 59.5 discard VE only last 3 layers (much worse)
38 8189d27 0.973894 60.2 discard embedding LR 0.8 to 0.9
39 7f63c17 0.972779 60.2 keep unembedding LR 0.006 to 0.005
40 d0662d1 0.974038 60.2 discard RoPE base 200K to 400K
41 d3840ec 0.974356 60.2 discard constant WD at 0.1 (decaying better)
42 264a05b 0.972694 60.2 keep add WD 0.01 to lm_head
43 7d3f0e4 0.972847 60.2 discard softcap 15 to 13
44 00a7c09 0.979754 72.6 discard depth 11 dim 640 (too big, too few steps)
45 674a510 0.975033 60.2 discard add WD 0.01 to embeddings (hurts)
46 b1f02f7 0.975328 60.2 discard add 2% warmup (any warmup hurts)
47 81261f5 0.973469 60.2 discard halve value embedding LR
48 51f0499 0.972844 60.2 discard x0_lambda beta1 0.96 to 0.90
49 de48b64 0.974912 60.2 discard SSSL pattern (more long layers hurt steps)
50 01a3c69 0.973105 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.02
51 86c7e66 0.974639 60.2 discard lm_head init std 0.001 to 0.01
52 489bb99 0.976462 60.2 discard x0_lambda init 0.0 (x0 skip important)
53 a16391b 0.973059 60.2 discard rotary precompute 10x to 2x
54 8dd93ec 0.972712 60.2 discard VE LR 1.5x (flat)
55 802d184 0.974123 60.2 discard embedding init std 1.0 to 2.0
56 2b9a688 0.974331 60.2 discard sqrt WD schedule
57 ffcb3c2 0.972982 60.2 discard muon start momentum 0.85 to 0.80
58 3cde993 0.974655 66.2 discard depth 10 same dim 640 (too few steps)
59 8be9036 0.975285 53.9 discard depth 8 dim 640 (too shallow)
60 2271cc2 0.974190 60.2 discard WD follows LR schedule
61 46cf5f2 0.983719 54.6 discard parallel attn+MLP (much worse)
62 59316b9 0.973312 60.2 discard warmdown 0.7 to 0.65
63 c4b0731 0.973803 57.4 discard MLP hidden 4x to 3.5x
64 6193116 0.973173 60.2 discard RoPE base 200K to 150K
65 c1f79a6 0.973005 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.03
66 ee60bf7 0.976203 60.2 discard SSSSSL pattern (too few long layers)
67 a7b953a 0.973088 60.2 discard lm_head WD 0.01 to 0.05
68 41d50a8 0.972258 60.2 keep reduce transformer init scale by 0.8x
69 991abb2 0.972721 60.2 discard init scale 0.6x (0.8 better)
70 f5979a7 0.972128 60.2 keep init scale 0.7x
71 2216fd6 0.973025 60.2 discard init scale 0.65x (0.7 better)
72 ddcd35a 0.972587 60.2 discard embedding init std 1.0 to 0.7
73 8934eec 0.972776 60.2 discard lm_head init std 0.001 to 0.002
74 92b4765 0.973847 60.2 discard small random init for c_proj (worse)
75 d385aa7 0.972901 60.2 discard scalar LR 0.5 to 0.7
76 db37d12 0.973155 60.2 discard unembedding LR 0.005 to 0.004
77 f04daec 0.973155 60.2 discard weight decay 0.2 to 0.25
78 d931c3a 0.975790 60.2 discard x0_lambda init 0.05 to 0.04 (worse)
79 c5a4645 0.972216 60.2 discard VE init scale 0.5x of transformer init
80 30f1b8d 0.973361 60.2 discard cosine warmdown schedule (linear better)
81 5a9c951 0.972877 63.1 discard MLP hidden 4x to 4.5x (fewer steps)
82 ab8f970 0.975964 60.2 discard decreasing resid_lambda init (hurts)
83 2a3f587 0.972901 60.2 discard softcap 15 to 14
84 362937e 0.972495 60.2 discard VE gate channels 32 to 16
85 0d77d4d 0.972621 60.2 discard Adam beta2 0.95 to 0.99
86 4eebd43 0.973493 60.2 discard x0_lambda LR 2x
87 b85567f 0.979987 52.0 discard multi-query attention n_kv_head=1 (too few KV heads)
88 0da44e6 0.973545 60.2 discard small nonzero init for c_proj (zero better)
89 d6c139a 0.973831 60.2 discard embedding init std 1.0 to 0.5
90 d70987b 3.215849 60.2 discard weight tying (shared embed/unembed, broken)
91 bff5cda 0.975852 59.5 discard VE every 3rd layer (too few VEs)
92 5953d58 0.973423 60.2 discard WD constant until warmdown then decay
93 d1eb994 0.974314 60.2 discard smaller QK init 0.5x (uniform init matters for Muon)
94 3c19fba 0.974046 60.2 discard depth-dependent init scale 1/sqrt(layer+1)
95 119065a 0.972335 60.2 discard init scale 0.7 to 0.72
96 97dda85 0.972097 60.2 keep init scale 0.7 to 0.68
97 58b8b7a 0.972350 60.2 discard init scale 0.68 to 0.66 (0.68 better)
98 70c2737 0.972731 60.2 discard Muon NorMuon beta2 0.95 to 0.98
99 8232e01 0.973000 60.2 discard resid_lambda LR 0.01x to 0.04x
100 21389c4 0.973723 60.2 discard Adam beta1 0.8 to 0.9
101 e4c0f3e 0.974043 60.2 discard short window 1/6 context (slower)
102 2e2a2f8 0.972632 60.2 discard short window 1/10 context (quality loss)
103 9db7b86 0.972744 60.2 discard lm_head init std 0.001 to 0.0005
104 ece9101 0.972009 60.2 keep tiny embedding WD 0.001
105 b07c56b 0.972438 60.2 discard embedding WD 0.001 to 0.002
106 1a85362 0.971058 60.2 keep tiny VE WD 0.001
107 73c77ca 0.970655 60.2 keep VE WD 0.001 to 0.002
108 637f82f 0.970433 60.2 keep VE WD 0.002 to 0.003
109 c152812 0.970644 60.2 discard VE WD 0.003 to 0.005 (0.003 better)
110 efd2171 0.970703 60.2 discard embedding WD 0.001 to 0.002
111 328de7c 0.970612 60.2 discard lm_head WD 0.01 to 0.02
112 c0c2349 0.970758 60.2 discard lm_head WD 0.01 to 0.005
113 b1d5004 0.969952 60.2 keep embedding LR 0.8 to 0.9 (with WD)
114 2ca8872 0.970767 60.2 discard embedding LR 0.9 to 1.0
115 74a3b33 0.970759 60.2 discard unembedding LR 0.005 to 0.006
116 d1f68da 0.970106 60.2 discard embedding WD 0.001 to 0.002 (with LR 0.9)
117 ebbe8c0 0.971004 60.2 discard matrix LR 0.04 to 0.045
118 b9ee7d6 0.970040 60.2 discard VE WD 0.003 to 0.004
119 2f0a8ec 0.970573 60.2 discard Muon WD 0.2 to 0.22
120 438a26e 0.969686 60.2 keep warmdown 0.7 to 0.75
121 d9322b9 0.970244 60.2 discard warmdown 0.75 to 0.8
122 8876cf3 0.969714 60.2 discard FINAL_LR_FRAC 0.05 to 0.03
123 80330e2 0.970135 60.2 discard x0_lambda init 0.05 to 0.06
124 2f0cec6 0.970678 60.2 discard RoPE base 200K to 300K
125 c044a14 0.970212 60.2 discard VE gate scale 2 to 3
126 80a519a 0.969857 60.2 discard VE LR 1.5x with WD
127 a6b6476 0.970286 60.2 discard muon momentum warmup 200 to 150 steps
+16 -16
View File
@@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ class GPT(nn.Module):
torch.nn.init.normal_(self.lm_head.weight, mean=0.0, std=0.001)
# Transformer blocks
n_embd = self.config.n_embd
s = 0.68 * 3**0.5 * n_embd**-0.5
s = 3**0.5 * n_embd**-0.5
for block in self.transformer.h:
torch.nn.init.uniform_(block.attn.c_q.weight, -s, s)
torch.nn.init.uniform_(block.attn.c_k.weight, -s, s)
@@ -162,7 +162,7 @@ class GPT(nn.Module):
torch.nn.init.zeros_(block.mlp.c_proj.weight)
# Per-layer scalars
self.resid_lambdas.fill_(1.0)
self.x0_lambdas.fill_(0.05)
self.x0_lambdas.fill_(0.1)
# Value embeddings
for ve in self.value_embeds.values():
torch.nn.init.uniform_(ve.weight, -s, s)
@@ -179,7 +179,7 @@ class GPT(nn.Module):
for ve in self.value_embeds.values():
ve.to(dtype=torch.bfloat16)
def _precompute_rotary_embeddings(self, seq_len, head_dim, base=200000, device=None):
def _precompute_rotary_embeddings(self, seq_len, head_dim, base=10000, device=None):
if device is None:
device = self.transformer.wte.weight.device
channel_range = torch.arange(0, head_dim, 2, dtype=torch.float32, device=device)
@@ -195,7 +195,7 @@ class GPT(nn.Module):
pattern = config.window_pattern.upper()
assert all(c in "SL" for c in pattern)
long_window = config.sequence_len
short_window = long_window // 8
short_window = long_window // 2
char_to_window = {"L": (long_window, 0), "S": (short_window, 0)}
window_sizes = []
for layer_idx in range(config.n_layer):
@@ -247,9 +247,9 @@ class GPT(nn.Module):
dmodel_lr_scale = (model_dim / 768) ** -0.5
print(f"Scaling AdamW LRs by 1/sqrt({model_dim}/768) = {dmodel_lr_scale:.6f}")
param_groups = [
dict(kind='adamw', params=lm_head_params, lr=unembedding_lr * dmodel_lr_scale, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.01),
dict(kind='adamw', params=embedding_params, lr=embedding_lr * dmodel_lr_scale, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.001),
dict(kind='adamw', params=value_embeds_params, lr=embedding_lr * dmodel_lr_scale, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.003),
dict(kind='adamw', params=lm_head_params, lr=unembedding_lr * dmodel_lr_scale, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.0),
dict(kind='adamw', params=embedding_params, lr=embedding_lr * dmodel_lr_scale, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.0),
dict(kind='adamw', params=value_embeds_params, lr=embedding_lr * dmodel_lr_scale, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.0),
dict(kind='adamw', params=resid_params, lr=scalar_lr * 0.01, betas=adam_betas, eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.0),
dict(kind='adamw', params=x0_params, lr=scalar_lr, betas=(0.96, 0.95), eps=1e-10, weight_decay=0.0),
]
@@ -429,24 +429,24 @@ class MuonAdamW(torch.optim.Optimizer):
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Model architecture
ASPECT_RATIO = 57 # model_dim = depth * ASPECT_RATIO
ASPECT_RATIO = 64 # model_dim = depth * ASPECT_RATIO
HEAD_DIM = 128 # target head dimension for attention
WINDOW_PATTERN = "SSSSL" # sliding window pattern: L=full, S=half context
WINDOW_PATTERN = "SSSL" # sliding window pattern: L=full, S=half context
# Optimization
TOTAL_BATCH_SIZE = 2**18 # ~262K tokens per optimizer step
EMBEDDING_LR = 0.9 # learning rate for token embeddings (Adam)
UNEMBEDDING_LR = 0.005 # learning rate for lm_head (Adam)
TOTAL_BATCH_SIZE = 2**19 # ~524K tokens per optimizer step
EMBEDDING_LR = 0.6 # learning rate for token embeddings (Adam)
UNEMBEDDING_LR = 0.004 # learning rate for lm_head (Adam)
MATRIX_LR = 0.04 # learning rate for matrix parameters (Muon)
SCALAR_LR = 0.5 # learning rate for per-layer scalars (Adam)
WEIGHT_DECAY = 0.2 # cautious weight decay for Muon
ADAM_BETAS = (0.8, 0.95) # Adam beta1, beta2
WARMUP_RATIO = 0.0 # fraction of time budget for LR warmup
WARMDOWN_RATIO = 0.75 # fraction of time budget for LR warmdown
FINAL_LR_FRAC = 0.05 # final LR as fraction of initial
WARMDOWN_RATIO = 0.5 # fraction of time budget for LR warmdown
FINAL_LR_FRAC = 0.0 # final LR as fraction of initial
# Model size
DEPTH = 9 # number of transformer layers
DEPTH = 8 # number of transformer layers
DEVICE_BATCH_SIZE = 128 # per-device batch size (reduce if OOM)
# ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
@@ -524,7 +524,7 @@ def get_lr_multiplier(progress):
return cooldown * 1.0 + (1 - cooldown) * FINAL_LR_FRAC
def get_muon_momentum(step):
frac = min(step / 200, 1)
frac = min(step / 300, 1)
return (1 - frac) * 0.85 + frac * 0.95
def get_weight_decay(progress):