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Training

Cosine Schedule

Decaying the learning rate along half a cosine curve from its peak toward a minimum.

Definition

A cosine schedule decays the learning rate from its peak value following one half of a cosine curve, reaching a small minimum by the end of training. The smooth, gradual decay avoids the abrupt drops of step schedules and tends to yield better final quality. It is usually paired with a short linear warmup at the start, and variants with warm restarts periodically reset the rate.