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Learning Rate

The learning rate controls the size of each weight update. Too high and training diverges; too low and training is slow or stalls. It is the single most important hyperparameter in LLM training, typically in the range 1e-5 to 3e-4.

What is Learning Rate?

The learning rate controls the size of each weight update. Too high and training diverges; too low and training is slow or stalls. It is the single most important hyperparameter in LLM training, typically in the range 1e-5 to 3e-4.

The learning rate controls the size of each weight update. Too high and training diverges; too low and training is slow or stalls. It is the single most important hyperparameter in LLM training, typically in the range 1e-5 to 3e-4.

Where is it used?

LLaMA-2 7B uses a peak LR of 3e-4 with cosine decay; GPT-3 175B uses 6e-5. Fine-tuning uses much lower rates (1e-5 to 5e-5). LoRA fine-tuning uses higher rates (1e-4 to 3e-4) because only adapter weights are updated.

How to build it

Set in the optimizer: `AdamW(model.parameters(), lr=3e-4)`. Use a warmup phase: linearly increase LR from 0 to peak over the first 2000 steps, then cosine decay to 10% of peak. HuggingFace: `get_cosine_schedule_with_warmup(optimizer, num_warmup_steps, num_training_steps)`.