Record: Coprime-Stride Loader + Full GPTQ + XSA-all — val_bpb 1.1136 (3-seed mean)

3-seed results: 1.1136/1.1133/1.1139 (mean 1.1136, std 0.0003)
Built on PR openai#549 + PR openai#1060 with optimized GPTQ reserve (10s vs 14s).

Author: Bortlesboat

records/track_10min_16mb/2026-03-29_V16_CoprimeSWA_EMA_1.1136/README.md

@@ -0,0 +1,94 @@
+# Record: Coprime-Stride Loader + Full Hessian GPTQ + XSA-all + Optimized GPTQ Reserve (val_bpb 1.1136)
+
+**val_bpb: 1.1136** (3-seed mean, std 0.0003) | **~15.90 MB** | 8xH100 SXM, 600s train, ~85s eval
+
+Built on [PR #549](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/549) by @abaybektursun and [PR #1060](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/1060) by @dexhunter.
+
+## Results (8xH100 SXM, no TTT)
+
+| Seed | Sliding BPB | Artifact |
+|------|-------------|----------|
+| 1337 | **1.1136** | 15,901,403 |
+| 42 | **1.1133** | 15,888,867 |
+| 999 | **1.1139** | 15,892,171 |
+| **Mean +/- Std** | **1.1136 +/- 0.0003** | |
+
+## What's New
+
+This submission extends PR #1060's coprime-stride loader + Full Hessian GPTQ stack with two targeted improvements:
+
+### 1. GPTQ Reserve Optimization
+Reduced GPTQ calibration reserve from 14s to 10s. PR #1060's GPTQ calibration completes in ~8.4s, so 14s wastes ~4s of training budget. This recovers ~44 additional training steps at 91ms/step, translating to measurable BPB improvement.
+
+### 2. FA3/FA2 Graceful Fallback
+Added try/except import for `flash_attn_interface` (FA3) with fallback to `flash_attn` (FA2). Allows the same script to run on pods with or without FA3 Hopper kernels built.
+
+### 3. FP32 SWA Accumulation (experimental, not used in final)
+Fixed SWA accumulation to use FP32 instead of model dtype (BF16). A/B testing showed EMA(0.997) still outperforms SWA on this stack by ~0.0006 BPB, so EMA is used for the final submission.
+
+## Architecture
+
+PR #549 + PR #1060 stack:
+- 11L, 512d, 8H/4KV (GQA), MLP 3x LeakyReLU(0.5)^2
+- Coprime-stride multi-shard data pipeline
+- XSA on all 11 layers, BigramHash(2816x112), SmearGate
+- Partial RoPE (16d), LN Scale, EMA(0.997)
+- Full Hessian GPTQ int6 + LZMA compression (10s reserve)
+- Parallel Muon + Parameter Banking, FA3 Hopper
+
+## Timing
+
+| Phase | Time |
+|-------|------|
+| Training (~6,479 steps @ 91ms) | 590s |
+| GPTQ calibration + quantization | 10s (reserved from training) |
+| Sliding window eval (stride=64) | ~85s |
+| **Total eval** | **~85s** |
+
+## Env Vars (overrides from defaults)
+
+```
+BIGRAM_VOCAB_SIZE=2816
+BIGRAM_DIM=112
+XSA_LAST_N=11
+USE_GPTQ=1
+GPTQ_RESERVE_MS=10000
+WARMDOWN_ITERS=4000
+SWA_APPLY=0
+TTT_ENABLED=0
+```
+
+## Rule Compliance
+
+- Standard F.cross_entropy scoring (softmax, sum=1)
+- No TTT, no mixer, no eval-built adaptation, no unnormalized scoring
+- Full `fineweb_val_*` split in canonical sorted order with tokenizer-derived byte accounting
+- Artifact < 16,000,000 bytes (all 3 seeds)
+- Training < 600s, eval < 600s
+- Causal sliding-window evaluation on the full validation split (stride=64)
+
+## Reproduction
+
+```bash
+# From this records folder (with data symlinked):
+SEED=1337 \
+BIGRAM_VOCAB_SIZE=2816 \
+BIGRAM_DIM=112 \
+XSA_LAST_N=11 \
+USE_GPTQ=1 \
+GPTQ_RESERVE_MS=10000 \
+WARMDOWN_ITERS=4000 \
+SWA_APPLY=0 \
+TTT_ENABLED=0 \
+torchrun --standalone --nproc_per_node=8 train_gpt.py
+```
+
+Environment: PyTorch 2.6+, Flash Attention 3 (`flash_attn_interface`), 8xH100 SXM.
+
+## Credits
+
+- **Base scaffold**: [PR #549](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/549) by @abaybektursun (LeakyReLU^2 + Parallel Muon)
+- **Coprime-stride loader + Full GPTQ + XSA-all**: [PR #1060](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/1060) by @dexhunter
+- **Data pipeline ideas**: [PR #726](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/726) by @DeepReinforce
+- **Full Hessian GPTQ**: [PR #634](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/634) by @raahilshah
+- **XSA**: [PR #287](https://github.com/openai/parameter-golf/pull/287) by @jfprincz

records/track_10min_16mb/2026-03-29_V16_CoprimeSWA_EMA_1.1136/submission.json

@@ -0,0 +1,9 @@
+{
+  "name": "Coprime-Stride Loader + Full Hessian GPTQ + XSA-all + FA3 Fallback",
+  "val_bpb": 1.1136,
+  "bytes_total": 15901403,
+  "blurb": "Coprime-stride multi-shard data pipeline (PR #726 style) + Full Hessian GPTQ with Cholesky error compensation + XSA on all 11 layers + BigramHash(2816x112) + EMA(0.997) + Parallel Muon + FA3/FA2 graceful fallback. GPTQ reserve reduced from 14s to 10s for ~44 extra training steps. No TTT. 3-seed mean: 1.1136 (std 0.0003). Built on PR #549 and PR #1060.",
+  "author": "Bortlesboat",
+  "github_id": "Bortlesboat",
+  "date": "2026-03-29"
+}