Quadratic Models Surprisingly Accurately Describe LLM Pretraining, Paper Finds
jasondeanlee · x · 2026-07-30
Researcher alexmeterez shared findings on how well optimization theory's simplest model—the quadratic—describes LLM pretraining, showing it works surprisingly well.
By linearizing a 150M parameter model at checkpoints during training, the local Taylor expansion accurately tracks the true loss for up to 10% of the training budget.
Related event: Quadratic Models Can Accurately Describe LLM Pre-training Dynamics(3 posts)→
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