Pretrained Weights Exhibit Heavy-Tailed Distribution
torchcompiled · x · 2026-07-15
The author states that this exploration stems from a long-standing puzzle: while preconditioning helps, it doesn't truly account for the "optimization distance" certain parameters need to cover.
He also mentions observing a heavy-tailed weight distribution in pretrained models, which might be related to this parameter scaling and optimization difficulty.
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