vamsi aribandi

Posts 2

The best estimate of KL ≢ the best estimate of its gradient

Even after finding an estimate of KL that produces the correct gradient, reducing the variance of the estimator doesn’t necessarily translate to reducing the variance of the corresponding gradient.

A visual guide to parallel Transformers

Illustrating a Transformer’s forward and backward passes across different sharding strategies; and their combinations used to train frontier LLMs