artifacts/adamw_baseline_cmpatino-0/README.md

adamw_baseline_cmpatino-0

Status: Negative result. Did not reach 3.28 in 5625 steps.

What was tried

A literal reading of the README's "AdamW baseline" line:

AdamW (lr=0.0015, wd=0.1, betas=0.9/0.95, warmup=250): 5,625 steps

implemented as a single AdamW group covering all parameters with lr=0.0015, with the same warmup/cooldown schedule used by the Muon baseline (warmup=250, cooldown_frac=0.7).

Result

val_loss = 3.39869 at step 5625. Far above the 3.28 threshold.

Why it failed

Reading the upstream reference log (a63a68d1-...) shows the reference "AdamW baseline" is multi-LR, with two AdamW optimizers:

Group	LR	wd	betas
embed.weight	0.3	0	(0.8, 0.95)
proj.weight	1/320 ≈ 0.003125	0	(0.8, 0.95)
params with ndim < 2 (biases, RMSNorm gains)	0.01	0	(0.8, 0.95)
blocks.* with ndim ≥ 2 (the "real" target)	0.0015	0.1	(0.9, 0.95)

Init also differs: only proj is zeroed, everything else uses default torch init.

A single LR of 0.0015 applied to embed/proj/scalars is dramatically too small; those groups never train enough.

Files

• train_gpt_adamw_cmpatino-0.py — single-LR AdamW reproduction
• train_log_cmpatino-0.txt — full training log
• results.json — machine-readable result

Follow-up

Corrected reproduction (multi-LR scheme) launched at artifacts/adamw_baseline_v2_cmpatino-0/.