Prismix
arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 4 min read

Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining

#paper #pricing #hardware

Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Like Read original ↗

Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2606.11387 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Jun 2026]

Title:Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining

View a PDF of the paper titled Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining, by Felipe Chavarro Polania
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:Short pretraining runs can reduce experimental cost, but they can also over-promote configurations that only look strong at tiny budgets. We study an auditable staged-promotion protocol for a fixed micro-pretraining runner on two heterogeneous host blocks: Windows A100 and Linux L40S. Starting from twelve prior-screened configurations, we use staged budgets of 2 minutes, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 60 minutes, and 12 hours, with frozen promotion rules before expensive continuations.
The early screens are intentionally treated as unstable: the 5- and 10-minute rankings are host-sensitive, and the eventual 12-hour top-ranked condition is not the mean-best condition at the replicated 10-minute gate. Because seed ranges differ across stages, these changes are operational promotion evidence, not within-seed curves. A replicated 60-minute gate keeps the Staged Factorial Screening bridge reference in the promoted set, where it ranks first in all four 60-minute host-seed cells. In the final 12-hour confirmation package, the bridge condition ranks first in all four host-seed cells across two seeds; the greedy comparator does not meet the frozen 0.010 val_bpb near-equivalence rule; and the cheaper d8/ar48 (depth-8, aspect-48) sentinel does not meet the frozen 0.020 mean-gap rule.
The executed 12-hour branch spends 144 GPU-hours, and the full staged protocol records 169.2 training GPU-hours including screening stages. Continuing all four 60-minute candidates would spend 192 GPU-hours, while continuing all nine replicated 10-minute candidates would spend 432 GPU-hours. The latter numbers are accounting counterfactuals for unrun continuations, not evidence that skipped candidates could not have overtaken the reference. The result is a bounded cost-allocation finding, not a claim of global optimality, capacity-normalized superiority, or superiority over adaptive hyperparameter optimization methods.
Comments: 14 pages, 5 figures; 12-hour dual-host micro-pretraining promotion study; source package includes curated ancillary artifacts
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.11387 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2606.11387v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.11387
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Felipe Chavarro Polania [view email]
[v1] Tue, 9 Jun 2026 19:10:54 UTC (474 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

    View a PDF of the paper titled Small Experiments, Cheaper Decisions: A Case Study in Staged Promotion for Micro-Pretraining, by Felipe Chavarro Polania
  • View PDF
  • HTML (experimental)
  • TeX Source
Ancillary-file links:

Ancillary files (details):

Current browse context:

cs.CL
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:

References & Citations

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy Reddit
Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language