Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them
Paper • 2509.02046 • Published • 14
Task 2 of Advanced NLP Assignment 2: one dense decoder-only
transformer (33M params) trained from scratch on
browndw/human-ai-parallel-corpus with five hand-written
optimizers, implemented from the appendix pseudocode of
Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them
(arXiv:2509.02046). Every run uses an identical 39,073,280-token
budget (1x the dataset) and an identical seed-20 data stream.
| Optimizer | Category | Final val loss | Final val PPL | Final BLEU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
adamw |
Baseline | 3.9975 | 54.46 | 0.066 |
cautious |
Variance-reduced AdamW variant | 4.0855 | 59.47 | 0.067 |
lion |
Memory-efficient | 4.1461 | 63.19 | 0.041 |
Each subfolder holds final.pt (state dict + config) and
history.json (validation loss and BLEU at every 0.1x of the
dataset). tokenizer.json is the shared English 16k byte-level
BPE used by all runs.