# ATTUNE: Agentic Throughput Tuning for LLM Training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17528 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17528/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Optuna: A Next-generation Hyperparameter Optimization Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10902/) (2019)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00352/) (2023)
- [CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17760/) (2023)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13131/) (2025)
- [Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05507/) (2019)
- [Efficient Large-Scale Language Model Training on GPU Clusters Using Megatron-LM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.04473/) (2021)
- [Why Do Multi-Agent LLM Systems Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13657/) (2025)
- [DeepSpeed-MoE: Advancing Mixture-of-Experts Inference and Training to Power Next-Generation AI Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05596/) (2022)
- [ZeRO-Offload: Democratizing Billion-Scale Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.06840/) (2021)
- [Beyond Data and Model Parallelism for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.05358/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18272/) (2024)
- [MLPerf Training Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01500/) (2019)
- [Should we be going MAD? A Look at Multi-Agent Debate Strategies for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17371/) (2023)
- [MegaScale: Scaling Large Language Model Training to More Than 10,000 GPUs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15627/) (2024)
- [Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06189/) (2025)
- [Galvatron: Efficient Transformer Training over Multiple GPUs Using Automatic Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13878/) (2022)
- [GPTuner: A Manual-Reading Database Tuning System via GPT-Guided Bayesian Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03157/) (2023)
- [vTrain: A Simulation Framework for Evaluating Cost-effective and Compute-optimal Large Language Model Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.12391/) (2023)
- [MoE Parallel Folding: Heterogeneous Parallelism Mappings for Efficient Large-Scale MoE Model Training with Megatron Core](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14960/) (2025)
- [Sailor: Automating Distributed Training over Dynamic, Heterogeneous, and Geo-distributed Clusters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.17096/) (2025)
- [TREX: Automating LLM Fine-tuning via Agent-Driven Tree-based Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14116/) (2026)
- [Mist: Efficient Distributed Training of Large Language Models via Memory-Parallelism Co-Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19050/) (2025)
- [Rubick: Exploiting Job Reconfigurability for Deep Learning Cluster Scheduling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.08586/) (2024)
- [ASAP: an Agentic Solution to Auto-optimize Performance of Large-Scale LLM Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03844/) (2025)
- [CUCo: An Agentic Framework for Compute and Communication Co-design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.02376/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Training recipes are tuned by hand for one model, cluster and workload, and every new model, accelerator, framework version or dataset means tuning again. Automated tuners search a fixed space of knobs and check only that a job runs, yet a configuration can run to completion while it silently changes training. ATTUNE is a single coding agent that tunes any working recipe for the workload and stack at hand, unattended, within a GPU-hour budget the user sets. It diagnoses each run and changes one lever at a time, guided by a catalog of lessons from past campaigns, and ships a recipe only if it passes a correctness gate: a configuration check against objective-changing settings and known stack defects, and a convergence check of its loss curve against the baseline's. On four held-out models at 64-128 GPUs, ATTUNE raises mean throughput over the strongest public recipe run on our stack by 6.7% on Llama-3.1-405B (best campaign 11.9%) and 33.9% on GLM-4.5 (54.7%), whose public recipe was written for H100. It keeps Mixtral-8x22B's recipe, where nothing it finds clears the noise band. Under a common GPU-hour budget it beats OptiCo, Bayesian optimization and random search on GLM-4.5 and MiniMax-M2; on GLM-4.5 its mean gain is more than four times the best alternative's at less than half the GPU-hours, and on both models its tuning pays for itself within a day of training. The gate rejects no legitimate run and catches 16 of 24 faulty runs, missing only ones that barely move the 20-step loss. Ablations tie its best campaigns to one of its search rules: retrying an out-of-memory layout with recomputation. We release ATTUNE's code and TrainingThroughputBench, a leaderboard of the fastest known recipes for MoE models up to 744B parameters on up to 256 GPUs, each with its throughput, cost per million tokens and a passed correctness check, at https://github.com/amazon-science/attune.
