Stanford CS312 write-up explains sharpness and the edge of stability in pretraining

stanfordnlp · x · 2026-10-31

Stanford NLP reposted a student write-up from CS312 on sharpness, one of the most unintuitive concepts in LLM pretraining. The article explains what sharpness is, how it shows up in real training runs, why gradient descent tends to operate at the edge of stability, and which open questions remain.

Related event: Stanford CS312 Dissects Sharpness and the Edge of Stability in Pretraining(2 posts)→

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