Temperon: Full-Time SAM Quality at a Third Less Wall-Clock
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) doubles the cost of every training step, yet its benefit concentrates where training ends. We study where an expensive training mode should be spent and propose Temperon: a plain-SGD explorer for the first 43% of the epoch budget, then one scheduled hand-off that gives the entire final cosine anneal to a SAM-wrapped Muon refiner. On CIFAR-10/100, SVHN and Tiny ImageNet (five seeds, times reported as epochs-to-target times an idle-GPU-calibrated epoch cost), Temperon matches the best full-time-SAM recipe on accuracy everywhere while reaching the hardest common target 35%, 34% and 32% sooner on three of the four, and sits a tier above the published SAM+SGD...
| Authors | Stamatis Mastromichalakis |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 31 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 31 July 2026 |
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