Balancing Early Performance Sacrifices with Long-Term Gains: Scaling Learning-Rate Warmup Duration Across Training Horizons
Organizations: New York University
Abstract
Learning-rate warmup is a standard technique in language-model training, yet its duration remains largely heuristic. Common approaches use either a fixed number of updates or a fixed fraction of the training horizon, two choices that imply very different scaling as training gets longer. When should warmup stay fixed, and when should it grow with the horizon? We address this question with a quadratic model whose modes respond differently to the peak learning rate. Warmup slows progress in directions that already contract well at the peak rate, but can remove persistent error in directions near the stability edge, with higher peak rates shifting the balance toward longer warmup durations. This yields a compact horizon scaling law that captures regimes ranging from essentially no warmup, through fixed-duration warmup, to durations that grow with the training horizon, and explains how the preferred regime changes with peak learning rate. Because the law captures the tradeoff between giving up early progress and improving the trajectory that follows, it can be fit using shorter runs and used to predict warmup at substantially longer horizons. Together, our results explain several familiar properties of warmup through a single tradeoff and suggest treating warmup duration as a horizon-dependent hyperparameter rather than a fixed training heuristic.
Figures & tables
| Model | Peak LR | Warmup (k) | Fraction of horizon (T=128k) | Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60M | 0.004 | 30 | 23.4% | 3.404 |
| 100M | 0.005 | 50 | 39.1% | 3.246 |
| 350M | 0.004 | 40 | 31.3% | 2.983 |
| Evaluation | Median | RMSE | Mean regret |
|---|---|---|---|
| All horizons (descriptive) | 0.996 | 4.92 | |
| Alternating holdout | 0.996 | 4.98 |
| Selector | Parameters | Alternating | Four horizons | 128k |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absolute fit | 6 | |||
| Difference fit | 5 | |||
| 1k target | 0 | |||
| 10% target | 0 |
| Fit horizon | Absolute | Difference | Fixed dur. | Fixed frac. | 1k | 10% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20k (29 families) | ||||||
| 32k (33 families) |
| LR | LR | LR | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (k) | 250 | 500 | 1000 | 250 | 500 | 1000 | 250 | 500 | 1000 |
| 1k-warmup loss | 3.370 | 3.337 | 3.311 | 3.433 | 3.421 | 3.402 | 3.371 | 3.347 | 3.322 |
| 10% loss | 3.375 | 3.347 | 3.339 | 3.418 | 3.367 | 3.340 | 3.363 | 3.335 | 3.314 |
| 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.8 | 47.7 | 77.5 | 125.9 | 129.5 | 241.7 | 451.1 | |
| Loss | 3.372 | 3.336 | 3.311 | 3.412 | 3.362 | 3.338 | 3.359 | 3.325 | 3.303 |
| 0.8 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 56.6 | 95.2 | 160.0 | 116.0 | 213.5 | 392.9 | |
Appendix figures & tables41 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Training corpus | C4 English; 1,024 shards; 184,565,529,484 tokens |
| Tokenizer / storage | t5-base SentencePiece / uint16 |
| Sequence length | 256 |
| Batch size | 512, 131,072 tokens per update |
| Training budget | 128,000 updates; 16,777,216,000 tokens |
| AdamW / | / |
| Setting | 60M | 100M | 350M |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layers | 8 | 12 | 24 |
| Hidden dimension | 512 | 640 | 1,024 |
| MLP intermediate dimension | 1,376 | 1,708 | 2,736 |
| Attention heads / head dimension | 8 / 64 | 10 / 64 | 16 / 64 |
| Vocabulary size | 32,000 | 32,100 | 32,000 |
| Total parameters | 58,073,600 | 100,117,120 | 367,969,280 |
| Scale | Peak LRs ( ) | Families | Warmup range (updates) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60M | 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | 12 | 0–50,000 |
| 100M | 0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | 12 | 0–50,000 |
| 350M | 0.5, 0.7, 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | 9 | 0–64,000 |
| Setting | Choice |
|---|---|
| Fitting optimizer | Trust-region reflective (SciPy least_squares ) |
| Huber transition | loss units |
| Warmup offset | |
| Exponent bounds | |
| Absolute amplitudes | |
| Difference amplitude |
| Peak LR ( ) | Source warmups (updates) |
|---|---|
| 0.1 | 0, 256, 1,000, 4,000, 16,000 |
| 0.3 | 0, 128, 512, 2,000, 8,000 |
| 1 | 0, 512, 2,000, 8,000, 30,000 |
| 3 | 512, 1,500, 8,000, 16,000, 30,000 |
| 5 | 768, 2,000, 6,000, 16,000, 30,000 |
| 7 | 1,000, 3,000, 8,000, 20,000, 50,000 |
| Fork (k) | Branches | Preserved pairs | Same best | Mean regret | Max regret |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 18 | 19/20 | 6/6 | 0.00 | 0.00 |
| 16 | 22 | 27/31 | 3/6 | 1.38 | 4.65 |
| 32 | 29 | 50/56 | 4/6 | 1.61 | 8.78 |
| 64 | 29 | 49/56 | 4/6 | 0.53 | 2.81 |
| 128 | 30 | 57/60 | 5/6 | 0.02 | 0.10 |
| Setting | Value |
|---|---|
| Muon parameters | Hidden matrices: 59,013,120 |
| Auxiliary AdamW parameters | Embeddings, output head, norms: 41,104,000 |
| Muon momentum / Nesterov | 0.95 / enabled |
| Newton–Schulz iterations | 5 |
| Muon update scaling | after approximate orthogonalization |
| Muon peak LR ( ) | 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 1, 2 |
| Muon peak LR ( ) | 8k | 16k | 32k | 64k | 128k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0.1 | 0 | 512 | 512 | 512 | 2,000 |
| 0.2 | 512 | 2,000 | 2,000 | 8,000 | 8,000 |
| 0.5 | 512 | 2,000 | 8,000 | 8,000 | 8,000 |
| 1 | 512 | 2,000 | 8,000 | 16,000 | 16,000 |
| 2 | 2,000 | 2,000 | 8,000 | 16,000 | 50,000 |
| Shape | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Linear | |||
| Half-cosine | |||
| Concave quadratic |
| Shape | Peak LR ( ) | 8k | 16k | 32k | 64k | 128k |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linear | 0.5 | 256 | 256 | 256 | 384 | 768 |
| Linear | 1 | 128 | 128 | 768 | 768 | 1,500 |
| Linear | 5 | 768 | 2,000 | 4,000 | 20,000 | 30,000 |
| Half-cosine | 0.5 | 500 | 500 | 500 | 500 | 500 |
| Half-cosine | 1 | 500 | 500 | 500 | 500 | 500 |
| Half-cosine | 5 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 5,000 | 15,000 | 15,000 |
| Selector | Parameters | Alternating | Four horizons | 128k |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Absolute fit | 6 | 3.05 | ||
| Difference fit | 5 | 2.61 | ||
| Direct warmup scaling | 2 | 2.86 | ||
| Fixed best duration | 0 | – | 3.87 | |
| Fixed best fraction | 0 | – | 2.06 | |
| 1k target | 0 | 13.56 |
| Tolerance ( ) | Multiple | Median count | Median fraction of grid |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 62 / 132 | 1 | 16.7% |
| 2 | 92 / 132 | 2 | 20.0% |
| 5 | 124 / 132 | 4 | 40.8% |
| Item | Choice |
|---|---|
| Target fitting warmups | 2k, 8k, 16k updates |
| Fit horizons | 20k and 32k updates |
| Target horizons | 50k, 75k, 100k, 128k updates |
| Loss-law fits | absolute and difference forms |
| Primary practical predictor | absolute fit |
| Target candidates | same retained warmup grid as the full-grid benchmark |
| Selector | Through 20k (29 families) | Through 32k (33 families) |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute fit | ||
| Difference fit | ||
| Direct warmup scaling | ||
| Fixed best duration | ||
| Fixed best fraction | ||
| 1k target |
| Fitting-run design | Log-range positions / rule | Mean regret | Median family | Worst family |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Default triplet | Main-experiment runs | 2.51 | 1.67 | 8.88 |
| Wide coverage | 2.15 | 1.47 | 6.80 | |
| Short-end cluster | 2.32 | 1.47 | 12.34 | |
| Middle cluster | 3.55 | 2.13 | 13.44 | |
| Long-end cluster | 5.19 | 1.67 | 49.95 | |
| Random triplets | Up to 8 admissible triplets | 2.63 | 2.21 | 6.72 |
| Reference | Fitting runs | Checkpoints used | Mean regret |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main three-run fit | 3 | Shared post-warmup | 2.51 |
| Count-sweep fit | 3 | All selected post-warmup | 3.32 |
| Full-grid fit | All available | All post-warmup | 2.26 |
| Item | Setting |
|---|---|
| Model / batch / sequence length | 100M / 128 sequences / 256 tokens |
| Fit horizons | 50k and 75k updates |
| Target horizons | 250k, 500k, and 1M updates |
| Fitting warmups, LR | 0, 512, 8k warmup updates |
| Fitting warmups, LR | 8k, 16k, 32k warmup updates |
| Fitting warmups, LR | 12k, 16k, 32k warmup updates |
| Metric | Free | Fixed |
|---|---|---|
| Full-data absolute-fit median RMSE | ||
| Held-out absolute-fit median RMSE | ||
| Four-horizon absolute-fit regret | ||
| Three-run absolute-fit regret, 20k (29 families) | ||
| Three-run absolute-fit regret, 32k | ||
| Four-horizon difference-fit regret |
| Difference fit | Absolute fit | |||
| (updates) | Later-horizon regret | Final-horizon regret | Later-horizon regret | Final-horizon regret |
| 8 | ||||
| 16 | ||||
| 32 | ||||
| 64 | ||||
| 128 | ||||
| Model | Fit | Full RMSE | Full | Later regret |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 60M | Free | 6.59 | 0.993 | 2.83 |
| 60M | Shared | 6.92 | 0.993 | 2.24 |
| 100M | Free | 4.71 | 0.997 | 2.73 |
| 100M | Shared | 4.89 | 0.997 | 3.02 |
| 350M | Free | 4.81 | 0.997 | 0.88 |
| 350M | Shared | 4.88 | 0.997 | 1.77 |
Learning Rate Scheduling
Learning rate scheduling studies how to vary optimizer step sizes during training to improve stability, convergence, efficiency, and generalization.
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