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Alex Iacob

7 accepted papers

2026

DES-LOC: Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers for Foundation Models

ICLR 2026poster

Scaling foundation model training with Distributed Data Parallel~(DDP) methods is bandwidth-limited. Existing infrequent communication methods like Local SGD were designed to synchronize model parameters only and cannot be trivially applied to adaptive optimizers due to additional optimizer states.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

LoRDO: Distributed Low-Rank Optimization with Infrequent Communication

ICML 2026poster

Distributed training of foundation models via $\texttt{DDP}$ is limited by interconnect bandwidth. While infrequent communication strategies reduce synchronization frequency, they remain bottlenecked by the memory and communication requirements of optimizer states. Low-rank optimizers can alleviate …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MT-DAO: Multi-Timescale Distributed Adaptive Optimizers with Local Updates

ICLR 2026poster

Training large models with distributed data parallelism (DDP) requires frequent communication of gradients across workers, which can saturate bandwidth. Infrequent communication strategies (e.g., Local SGD) reduce this overhead but, when applied to adaptive optimizers, often suffer a performance gap…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Rethinking Data Curation in LLM Training: Online Reweighting Offers Better Generalization than Offline Methods

ICLR 2026poster

Data curation is a critical yet underexplored component in large language model (LLM) training. Existing approaches (such as data selection and data mixing) operate in an offline paradigm, decoupled from the training process. This separation introduces extra engineering overhead and makes curated su…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DEPT: Decoupled Embeddings for Pre-training Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Language Model pre-training uses broad data mixtures to enhance performance across domains and languages. However, training on such heterogeneous text corpora requires extensive and expensive efforts. Since these data sources vary significantly in lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects, they cause…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

LLM Unlearning via Neural Activation Redirection

NeurIPS 2025poster

The ability to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs is highly desirable. However, existing methods often struggle with balancing unlearning efficacy and retain model utility, and lack controllability at inference time to emulate base model behavior as if it had never seen the unlearned data. In th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SparsyFed: Sparse Adaptive Federated Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Sparse training is often adopted in cross-device federated learning (FL) environments where constrained devices collaboratively train a machine learning model on private data by exchanging pseudo-gradients across heterogeneous networks. Although sparse training methods can reduce communication overh…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar