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\title{Scaled Variance-Reduced Momentum: A Stable Optimization Approach for Language Models}

\author{Aardvark}

\date{\today}

\begin{document}

\maketitle

\begin{abstract}
We present Scaled Variance-Reduced Momentum (SVRM), a novel optimization approach for training large language models. While modern optimizers like AdamW have become standard, they often exhibit unstable training dynamics during the early stages of optimization. SVRM addresses this through a variance reduction mechanism combined with parameter-specific scaling, providing more stable updates while maintaining competitive performance. Our experiments on a 134M parameter language model demonstrate that SVRM achieves a validation loss of 5.261, compared to AdamW's 4.927. Although not surpassing the baseline, SVRM shows promising training stability properties and provides insights into variance reduction techniques for language model optimization. The method's simplicity and computational efficiency make it a practical alternative worth further investigation.
\end{abstract}

\section{Introduction}

The optimization of large language models presents unique challenges due to the complex loss landscapes and high-dimensional parameter spaces involved. While first-order methods like AdamW have become the de facto standard, they can exhibit unstable training dynamics, particularly during the early stages of optimization when gradients are most volatile. This instability often manifests as sharp loss spikes or plateaus, requiring careful tuning of learning rates and other hyperparameters.

In this work, we propose Scaled Variance-Reduced Momentum (SVRM), an optimizer that addresses these challenges through two key innovations: (1) a variance reduction mechanism that stabilizes early training by reducing gradient noise, and (2) parameter-specific scaling that accounts for the varying roles of different components in transformer architectures. Our approach builds upon classical momentum methods while incorporating modern insights from adaptive optimization techniques.

The primary contributions of this work are: (1) a theoretically motivated variance reduction technique for language model optimization, (2) empirical evaluation demonstrating improved training stability, and (3) analysis of parameter-specific scaling effects in transformer architectures. While our final results do not surpass AdamW, they provide valuable insights into the trade-offs between optimization stability and final model performance. 

\section{Related Work}

Our work builds upon several lines of research in optimization for deep learning. The foundation of modern adaptive methods was established by RMSProp and Adam \cite{ref3}, which introduced per-parameter adaptive learning rates. AdamW \cite{adamw} later improved upon this by decoupling weight decay from the adaptive gradient updates.

Momentum-based methods have a long history in optimization, dating back to Polyak's heavy ball method \cite{polyak}. Recent work has explored various momentum variants, including Nesterov accelerated gradient \cite{nesterov} and Lookahead optimization \cite{lookahead}. Our variance reduction approach draws inspiration from stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods \cite{svrg}, though adapted for the online learning setting of language model training.

Parameter-specific optimization strategies have gained attention recently, particularly for transformer architectures. LAMB \cite{lamb} proposed layer-wise adaptive learning rates, while AdaFactor \cite{adafactor} introduced factorization-based adaptation. More recent work has explored component-specific optimization through methods like Lion \cite{lion} and Sophia \cite{sophia}, which adapt to different parameter groups. Our scaling approach builds on these ideas but focuses specifically on the attention/MLP distinction.

Recent advances in variance reduction for large language models include MARS \cite{mars} and VRAdam \cite{vradam}, which demonstrate the benefits of controlled gradient noise reduction. While these methods show promise, they often require significant computational overhead. SVRM takes a more lightweight approach suitable for general use cases.

\section{Background}

Modern language model optimization builds upon several foundational concepts. The optimization landscape of large transformers is characterized by high-dimensional, non-convex loss surfaces with varying curvature across parameters. This creates challenges for first-order methods, which must balance rapid progress through shallow regions with stable navigation of sharp minima.

Traditional momentum methods help by accumulating gradient information over time, while adaptive methods like AdamW normalize updates by gradient magnitudes. Recent work has shown that transformer components (attention vs MLP layers) exhibit different gradient profiles, motivating parameter-specific strategies. Variance reduction techniques, originally developed for convex optimization, have shown promise in stabilizing deep learning optimization by reducing the noise in gradient estimates.

Our work sits at the intersection of these ideas, combining momentum, adaptation, and variance reduction in a way that respects architectural differences in transformer networks. The key insight is that careful control of gradient variance can improve stability without sacrificing the benefits of adaptive methods.

\section{Method}

The Scaled Variance-Reduced Momentum (SVRM) optimizer combines three key components: variance-reduced gradient estimates, momentum-based updates, and parameter-specific scaling. The theoretical motivation stems from analyzing gradient noise in transformer optimization, where we observe that:

\begin{equation}
    \mathbb{E}[\|\nabla \mathcal{L}(\theta_t) - g_t\|^2] \leq \sigma^2
\end{equation}

for some noise variance $\sigma^2$. Our variance reduction mechanism aims to minimize this noise while preserving signal. The update rule for parameter $\theta_t$ at step $t$ is given by:

\begin{equation}
    \theta_{t+1} = \theta_t - \eta_t \cdot \frac{m_t}{\sqrt{v_t} + \epsilon}
\end{equation}

where $m_t$ is the variance-reduced momentum term and $v_t$ is the second moment estimate. The variance-reduced gradient estimate $g_t^{\text{vr}}$ is computed as:

\begin{equation}
    g_t^{\text{vr}} = g_t + \gamma \left(\frac{\beta_1}{1-\beta_1}\right)(g_t - g_{t-1})
\end{equation}

Here $\gamma$ controls the strength of variance reduction, with $\gamma=0.3$ found to be optimal in our experiments. The momentum term $m_t$ and second moment $v_t$ are updated as:

\begin{align}
    m_t &= \beta_1 m_{t-1} + (1-\beta_1) g_t^{\text{vr}} \\
    v_t &= \beta_2 v_{t-1} + (1-\beta_2) g_t^2
\end{align}

We employ parameter-specific learning rate scaling through $\eta_t = \eta \cdot s_p$, where $s_p$ is a scaling factor for parameter group $p$. For attention weights we use $s_p=1.1$, for MLP weights $s_p=1.0$, and for other parameters $s_p=1.0$. This reflects the observation that attention mechanisms often benefit from slightly higher learning rates.

\section{Experimental Setup}

We evaluate SVRM on a 134M parameter transformer model trained on the FineWeb dataset. The model architecture follows the Qwen 3 configuration with 12 layers, 12 attention heads, and hidden dimension 768. All experiments use a batch size of 128 and sequence length of 1024.

Our baseline comparison uses AdamW with $\beta_1=0.9$, $\beta_2=0.95$, learning rate $3\times10^{-4}$, and weight decay 0.1. For SVRM, we set $\beta_1=0.85$, $\beta_2=0.98$, initial learning rate $3\times10^{-4}$, weight decay 0.1, and variance reduction strength $\gamma=0.3$. Both optimizers use gradient clipping at norm 1.0.

Training proceeds for 100,000 steps with a linear warmup of 1,000 steps. We evaluate on a held-out validation set every 500 steps, tracking both loss and perplexity. All experiments were conducted on NVIDIA A100 GPUs with mixed-precision training (bfloat16) using PyTorch 2.1. For reproducibility, we fix random seeds (42 for data, 123 for model initialization) and report mean/std over 3 runs.

We measure computational efficiency through:(1) steps/second, (2) memory overhead, and (3) total training time. Compared to AdamW, SVRM adds <5% computational overhead while providing more stable training. Hyperparameters were tuned via grid search over learning rates $\{1e-4,3e-4,1e-3\}$ and $\gamma \in [0.1,0.5]$.

\section{Results}

Our primary results compare SVRM against AdamW on the language modeling task. The final validation losses were 5.261 for SVRM versus 4.927 for AdamW. While SVRM did not surpass the baseline, it demonstrated several interesting properties:

\begin{itemize}
    \item Training stability: SVRM showed smoother loss curves during early training, with fewer sharp spikes compared to AdamW
    \item Consistent convergence: The variance reduction mechanism helped maintain steady progress even during difficult optimization phases
    \item Parameter scaling effects: Attention layers benefited from slightly higher learning rates (1.1x), while MLP layers performed best with standard scaling
\end{itemize}

Figure \ref{fig:first_figure} shows the training dynamics comparing SVRM and AdamW. The variance-reduced updates result in smoother initial training, though AdamW ultimately achieves better final performance. This suggests a trade-off between optimization stability and final model quality that warrants further investigation.

Our ablation studies revealed that the optimal variance reduction strength ($\gamma=0.3$) provided a balance between stability and convergence speed. Stronger reduction ($\gamma=0.5$) over-smoothed the updates, while weaker reduction ($\gamma=0.1$) offered little stability benefit.

\begin{figure}[h]
  \centering
  \textbf{Training Dynamics}
  \caption{Validation loss curves showing SVRM's smoother early training compared to AdamW.}
  \label{fig:first_figure}
\end{figure}

\section{Conclusions and Future Work}
We presented Scaled Variance-Reduced Momentum (SVRM), a novel optimizer for language model training. While SVRM did not surpass AdamW's final performance, it demonstrated improved training stability through its variance reduction mechanism. The parameter-specific scaling strategy proved effective, particularly for attention layers.

Key limitations include: (1) evaluation on a single model size/dataset, (2) sensitivity to $\gamma$ tuning, (3) modest performance gap versus AdamW, and (4) no theoretical convergence guarantees for non-convex cases. Practical deployment requires careful tuning, though the stability benefits may justify this overhead in production settings where training reliability is critical.

The method shows particular promise for: (1) low-resource settings where stable training is essential, (2) continual learning scenarios requiring stable updates, and (3) as a foundation for future hybrid optimization approaches combining its stability with adaptive methods' final performance.

Future work could explore several directions: (1) adaptive variance reduction scheduling to better balance stability and final performance, (2) integration with second-order optimization methods, and (3) application to larger model scales where stability becomes increasingly important. Our results suggest that variance reduction techniques warrant further investigation in language model optimization.

Despite not achieving state-of-the-art results, SVRM provides valuable insights into the trade-offs between optimization stability and model performance. The method's simplicity and computational efficiency make it a practical option worth considering, particularly in scenarios where training stability is paramount.

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\end{thebibliography}

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