ICML2026 Kakade: Pretraining

Pretraining Hard

  • base model quality is hard
  • continual learning is hard
  • shapes may change

Pretraining’s solutions

  • When do we stop?: cosine bakes in an end time
  • How big a batch?: more parallelism (fewer steps)… what’s the limits such that batches are too big?
  • does momentum help?

quadratic models