Discovering Learning-Friendly Generation Orders for Sequential Computation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Sato, Yuta, Kawamoto, Kazuhiko, Kera, Hiroshi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Sato, Yuta
Kawamoto, Kazuhiko
Kera, Hiroshi
author_facet Sato, Yuta
Kawamoto, Kazuhiko
Kera, Hiroshi
contents Sequential computation via autoregressive generation can make difficult tasks learnable, but the generation order of intermediate states strongly affects whether training succeeds. We address the problem of discovering a learning-friendly target order automatically, rather than relying on task-specific design. Our key observation is that learning-friendly orders cause a faster loss drop in the early stage of training. We exploit this by \emph{loss profiling}, which ranks candidate orders by the early-stage loss of a single short run. To handle the factorial candidate space, we wrap loss profiling in a hierarchical global -- local search over block- and within-block-level orderings. On six order-sensitive tasks, the method discovers effective orders up to $L=13$ from random initialization and up to $L=40$ from structured initialization, lifting success rates from about 10\% to near 100\%. On integer multiplication, it rediscovers the reverse-digit order that was reported to be efficient in prior studies. On delay dynamical systems, as a case study of multi-variate recurrences, learnability varies sharply even among valid topological sorts of the dependency graph: loss profiling identifies a learning-friendly one, and the global search even discovers orders surpassing hand-designed candidates.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_23875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discovering Learning-Friendly Generation Orders for Sequential Computation
Sato, Yuta
Kawamoto, Kazuhiko
Kera, Hiroshi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Sequential computation via autoregressive generation can make difficult tasks learnable, but the generation order of intermediate states strongly affects whether training succeeds. We address the problem of discovering a learning-friendly target order automatically, rather than relying on task-specific design. Our key observation is that learning-friendly orders cause a faster loss drop in the early stage of training. We exploit this by \emph{loss profiling}, which ranks candidate orders by the early-stage loss of a single short run. To handle the factorial candidate space, we wrap loss profiling in a hierarchical global -- local search over block- and within-block-level orderings. On six order-sensitive tasks, the method discovers effective orders up to $L=13$ from random initialization and up to $L=40$ from structured initialization, lifting success rates from about 10\% to near 100\%. On integer multiplication, it rediscovers the reverse-digit order that was reported to be efficient in prior studies. On delay dynamical systems, as a case study of multi-variate recurrences, learnability varies sharply even among valid topological sorts of the dependency graph: loss profiling identifies a learning-friendly one, and the global search even discovers orders surpassing hand-designed candidates.
title Discovering Learning-Friendly Generation Orders for Sequential Computation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23875