Rare tokens may be the culprit behind loss spikes in LLM training
ZimingLiu11 · x · 2026-11-01
In his Day 5 exposition for @MetaCircleAI, Ziming Liu highlights a persistent pain point in LLM pretraining: loss spikes. One explanation discussed in the linked paper attributes these spikes to rare tokens, where infrequent samples produce abnormally large gradients and cause sudden jumps in training loss.
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