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brcmthrowawayyesterday at 8:45 AM3 repliesview on HN

Do LLMs still use backprop?


Replies

samsartoryesterday at 5:10 PM

Yes. Pretraining and fine-tuning use standard Adam optimizers (usually with weight-decay). Reinforcement learning has been the odd-man out historically, but these days almost all RL algorithms also use backprop and gradient descent.

ForceBruyesterday at 9:03 AM

Are LLMs still trained by (variants of) stochastic GRADIENT descent? AFAIK what used to be called "backprop" is nowadays known as "automatic differentiation". It's widely used in PyTorch, JAX etc

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