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Albrecht: CARBS models compute cost per sample for hyperparameter search

Josh Albrecht · State of the Art: Training 70B LLMs on 10,000 H100 clusters · Jun 25, 2024 · at 47:25

Josh Albrecht, CTO of Imbue, explains how CARBS differs from traditional Bayesian hyperparameter optimization frameworks.

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“CARBS is, it's maybe a backronym, but it's for Cost Aware Pareto Region Bayesian Search... The point is that it's a cost aware hyperparameter tuner. So most hyperparameter tuners you kind of say, okay, here's this objective function. I want you to make this number as big as possible or as small as possible... That's usually saying like, you know, almost all of these hyperparameter configurations are, let's say they're all going to use the same number of GPUs or the same number of nodes. So it's going to run for the same amount of time... But what carbs does is it says, okay, actually, what if we relax that constraint? What if we say each of these different points, we're going to model how expensive it will be to sample this configuration.”

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