Shane Gu, Yufeng Lin, Dixi Yao, Xuchen Gong, Chenhao Tan
In pairwise comparisons where each judge chooses between an idea generated by its corresponding TIGER-8B policy and one generated by GPT-4.1, the three LLM researchers select the TIGER-8B idea in 56.6%-68.4% of 76 comparisons per researcher. PhD1 and PhD2 select the TIGER-8B idea in 19 of 30 pairs (63.3%) and 17 of 30 pairs (56.7%), respectively. All six directed cross-policy comparisons likewise favor the judge's matched TIGER-8B policy over an off-target policy, supporting the use of individual preference feedback for tailored research ideation.
Heavy-tailed stochastic gradient noise, commonly observed in transformer models, can destabilize the optimization process. Recent works mainly focus on developing and understanding approaches to address heavy-tailed noise in the centralized or distributed, synchronous setting, while asynchronous optimization under such noise remains underexplored, especially in the practical settings with local updates. In this work, we first investigate two asynchronous communication schemes (server- and client-centric) that handle stragglers under heavy-tailed gradient noise. We further propose and theoretically analyze algorithmic modifications based on delay-aware learning rate scheduling and delay compensation to enhance the performance of asynchronous algorithms. Our convergence guarantees achieve the optimal rate under heavy-tailed noise and improve delay tolerance compared with existing asynchronous approaches. Empirically, our approaches outperform prior synchronous and asynchronous methods in terms of accuracy/runtime trade-offs and are more robust to hyperparameters in both image and language tasks.