Lucas Beyer: early loss curves mislead — his favorite figure from the BigTransfer paper
giffmana · x · 2026-10-26
Lucas Beyer shares his favorite interview question: show candidates a loss curve plus one that starts far below the reference and ask what they can conclude — 'if they start saying yes, no job.' The attached figure from the BigTransfer paper shows weight decay 1e-5 beating 1e-4 early on, but the curves cross around 35k steps and 1e-4 ends higher (47 vs 44 upstream performance). Lesson: early training curves don't predict final performance; hyperparameter rankings flip with training duration.
Related event: AI Lab Interview Question: Don't Jump to Conclusions from Loss Curves(6 posts)→
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