Paul Janson

Paul Janson, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky

Pipeline parallelism enables training of large language models that exceed single-device memory, yet inter-stage activation communication becomes the dominant bottleneck when trained on low-bandwidth networks. Recent work in this area has proposed using fixed orthogonal projections to compress activations. However, this still results in a significant performance degradation and requires a number of non-standard adaptations to constrain the optimization. A natural alternative is to learn a low rank projection for each pipeline stage, however maintaining the necessary orthogonality of these projectors during training remains a challenge. We present Manifold Aware Projection Learning (MAPL), a method that treats inter-stage compression as a learnable orthogonal projection under explicit Stiefel manifold (orthogonal matrices) constraints. Rather than prescribing a fixed global subspace, MAPL lets each pipeline stage discover and continuously adapt its own task-optimal compression subspace via manifold-constrained steepest descent. To recover token-specific signals at stage boundaries, we introduce per-stage factorized anchor embeddings that allow for full-rank activation reconstruction with negligible communication overhead. We further show that we can incorporate residual vector quantization after projection with a streaming codebook synchronization protocol that amortizes dictionary communication. Across LLaMA models from 150M to 1B parameters we show that MAPL can be easily applied to the existing pipeline and can achieve high compression with neglibile performance degradation with a drastically improved tradeoffs in performance vs. compression compared to Subspace Networks.

Paul Janson, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky

Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges. Low-rank factorization offers a promising route to reduce training and inference costs, but the community lacks a stable recipe for training models from scratch using exclusively low-rank weights while matching the performance of the dense model. We demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be trained from scratch using exclusively low-rank factorized weights for all non-embedding matrices without auxiliary "full-rank" guidance required by prior methods. While native low-rank training often suffers from instability and loss spikes, we identify uncontrolled growth in the spectral norm (largest singular value) of the weight matrix update as the dominant factor. To address this, we introduce Spectron: Spectral renormalization with orthogonalization, which dynamically bounds the resultant weight updates based on the current spectral norms of the factors. Our method enables stable, end-to-end factorized training with negligible overhead. Finally, we establish compute-optimal scaling laws for natively low-rank transformers, demonstrating predictable power-law behavior and improved inference efficiency relative to dense models.

Yazan Obeidi, Amir Sarfi, Joel Lidin et al.

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) increasingly requires distributed compute, yet bandwidth constraints make it difficult to scale beyond well-provisioned datacenters-especially when model parallelism forces frequent, large inter-device communications. We study whether SparseLoCo, a low-communication data parallel method based on infrequent synchronization and sparse pseudo-gradient exchange, can be combined with low-bandwidth pipeline model parallelism via activation and activation-gradient compression. We introduce a heterogeneous distributed training framework where some participants host full replicas on high-bandwidth interconnects, while resource-limited participants are grouped to jointly instantiate a replica using pipeline parallelism with subspace-projected inter-stage communication. To make the recently introduced subspace pipeline compression compatible with SparseLoCo, we study a number of adaptations. Across large-scale language modeling experiments (178M-1B parameters) on standard pretraining corpora, we find that activation compression composes with SparseLoCo at modest cost, while selective (heterogeneous) compression consistently improves the loss-communication tradeoff relative to compressing all replicas-especially at aggressive compression ratios. These results suggest a practical path to incorporating low-bandwidth model parallelism and heterogeneous participants into LLM pre-training.

Paul Janson, Benjamin Therien, Quentin Anthony et al.

Learned optimizers have been an active research topic over the past decade, with increasing progress toward practical, general-purpose optimizers that can serve as drop-in replacements for widely used methods like Adam. However, recent advances -- such as VeLO, which was meta-trained for 4000 TPU-months -- remain largely inaccessible to the broader community, in part due to their reliance on JAX and the absence of user-friendly packages for applying the optimizers after meta-training. To address this gap, we introduce PyLO, a PyTorch-based library that brings learned optimizers to the broader machine learning community through familiar, widely adopted workflows. Unlike prior work focused on synthetic or convex tasks, our emphasis is on applying learned optimization to real-world large-scale pre-training tasks. Our release includes a CUDA-accelerated version of the small_fc_lopt learned optimizer architecture from (Metz et al., 2022a), delivering substantial speedups -- from 39.36 to 205.59 samples/sec throughput for training ViT B/16 with batch size 32. PyLO also allows us to easily combine learned optimizers with existing optimization tools such as learning rate schedules and weight decay. When doing so, we find that learned optimizers can substantially benefit. Our code is available at https://github.com/Belilovsky-Lab/pylo

Vaibhav Singh, Paul Janson, Paria Mehrbod et al.

The ever-growing availability of unlabeled data presents both opportunities and challenges for training artificial intelligence systems. While self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extracting meaningful representations from vast amounts of unlabeled data, existing methods still struggle to adapt to the non-stationary, non-IID nature of real-world data streams without forgetting previously learned knowledge. Recent works have adopted a repeated cosine annealing schedule for large-scale continual pre-training; however, these schedules (1) inherently cause forgetting during the re-warming phase and (2) have not been systematically compared to existing continual SSL methods. In this work, we systematically compare the widely used cosine schedule with the recently proposed infinite learning rate schedule and empirically find the latter to be a more effective alternative. Our extensive empirical evaluation across diverse image and language datasets demonstrates that the infinite learning rate schedule consistently enhances continual pre-training performance compared to a repeated cosine decay without being restricted to a fixed iteration budget. For instance, in a small-scale MAE pre-training setup, it outperforms several strong baselines from the literature. We then scale up our experiments to larger MAE pre-training and autoregressive language model pre-training. Our results show that the infinite learning rate schedule remains effective at scale, surpassing repeated cosine decay for both MAE pre-training and zero-shot LM benchmarks.

Paul Janson, Tiberiu Popa, Eugene Belilovsky

Text-conditioned video diffusion models have emerged as a powerful tool in the realm of video generation and editing. But their ability to capture the nuances of human movement remains under-explored. Indeed the ability of these models to faithfully model an array of text prompts can lead to a wide host of applications in human and character animation. In this work, we take initial steps to investigate whether these models can effectively guide the synthesis of realistic human body animations. Specifically we propose to synthesize human motion by deforming an SMPL-X body representation guided by Score distillation sampling (SDS) calculated using a video diffusion model. By analyzing the fidelity of the resulting animations, we gain insights into the extent to which we can obtain motion using publicly available text-to-video diffusion models using SDS. Our findings shed light on the potential and limitations of these models for generating diverse and plausible human motions, paving the way for further research in this exciting area.