# Rethinking Learning Rate Tuning in the Era of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.08859 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08859/

## Key facts

- Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 35 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Test-time compute and efficient thinking](https://mlsanity.com/lr/test-time-compute-and-efficient-thinking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Accurate, Large Minibatch SGD: Training ImageNet in 1 Hour](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02677/) (2017)
- [SuperGlue: Learning Feature Matching with Graph Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11763/) (2019)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Hyperband: A Novel Bandit-Based Approach to Hyperparameter Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.06560/) (2016)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01186/) (2015)
- [Object Detection with Deep Learning: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05511/) (2018)
- [Tune: A Research Platform for Distributed Model Selection and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05118/) (2018)
- [Population Based Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09846/) (2017)
- [Self-Driving Cars: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.04407/) (2019)
- [How to Start Training: The Effect of Initialization and Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01719/) (2018)
- [AutoLRS: Automatic Learning-Rate Schedule by Bayesian Optimization on the Fly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.10762/) (2021)
- [Demystifying Learning Rate Policies for High Accuracy Training of Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06477/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Security and Privacy Challenges of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00888/) (2024)
- [Predictable Scale: Part I, Step Law -- Optimal Hyperparameter Scaling Law in Large Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04715/) (2025)
- [History, Development, and Principles of Large Language Models-An Introductory Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06853/) (2024)
- [CE-CoLLM: Efficient and Adaptive Large Language Models Through Cloud-Edge Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02829/) (2024)
- [WSM: Decay-Free Learning Rate Schedule via Checkpoint Merging for LLM Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17634/) (2025)
- [Mid-Training of Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06826/) (2025)
- [DA-MoE: Towards Dynamic Expert Allocation for Mixture-of-Experts Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06669/) (2024)
- [Pre-training LLM without Learning Rate Decay Enhances Supervised Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.16127/) (2026)
- [Digital Forensics in the Age of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02963/) (2025)
- [Loop the Loopies!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.16051/) (2026)
- [Generative AI in Depth: A Survey of Recent Advances, Model Variants, and Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21887/) (2025)
- [Designing Domain-Specific Large Language Models: The Critical Role of Fine-Tuning in Public Opinion Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19308/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Limited Data: A Survey and Practical Guide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09539/) (2024)
- [Thinking While Speaking: Inference-Time Knowledge Transfer for Responsive and Intelligent Conversational Voice Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07397/) (2025)
- [FALCON: Fine-grained Activation Manipulation by Contrastive Orthogonal Unalignment for Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01472/) (2025)
- [Multi-Model Synthetic Training for Mission-Critical Small Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13047/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent the recent success of deep learning in achieving remarkable human-like predictive performance. It has become a mainstream strategy to leverage fine-tuning to adapt LLMs for various real-world applications due to the prohibitive expenses associated with LLM training. The learning rate is one of the most important hyperparameters in LLM fine-tuning with direct impacts on both fine-tuning efficiency and fine-tuned LLM quality. Existing learning rate policies are primarily designed for training traditional deep neural networks (DNNs), which may not work well for LLM fine-tuning. We reassess the research challenges and opportunities of learning rate tuning in the coming era of Large Language Models. This paper makes three original contributions. First, we revisit existing learning rate policies to analyze the critical challenges of learning rate tuning in the era of LLMs. Second, we present LRBench++ to benchmark learning rate policies and facilitate learning rate tuning for both traditional DNNs and LLMs. Third, our experimental analysis with LRBench++ demonstrates the key differences between LLM fine-tuning and traditional DNN training and validates our analysis.