Text set in serif type with a dotted bar in the margin was drafted by an LLM (claude-fable-5) and sometimes reviewed by the author. The rest is the author's own. How to read this site
alpha-curriculum → schedule-opt → schedopt-v1
schedopt-v1
investigation
Intent
The v1 arm of the schedule-optimization campaign gathers every experiment
scored against the original frozen objective: the probability, over random
seeds, that unseen_mismatch accuracy reaches m_star = 92.5 within
k = 400 steps, guarded by a two-waypoint dwell
(experiments/schedopt/config.json). Its members are the Phase-0
calibration that froze that objective, the Sobol design that first mapped the
three-parameter schedule family, the four Bayesian-optimization rounds
that climbed it, and the Phase-3 confirmation on held-out seeds. The
objective reached saturation here: the winning descent crosses on 0.94 of
held-out seeds and the top three candidates are statistically inseparable,
which is what motivated re-freezing a second operating point. The two
operating points are never merged, and no number recorded under v1 is
comparable to a number under v2.
Experiments
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20260722_084517_schedopt_granularity 2026-07-23Intent: A matched control: does the burst shape raise the crossing probability, or was its calibration edge a confound? \@{schedopt-granularity-intent}
A follow-up control for the schedule-opt campaign. In calibration the burst schedule incumbent crossed the band by the budget more often than any smooth probe, but it ran at a different segment granularity and horizon, 48 segments over 900 steps against the smooth arms' 16 over 400, so its edge confounded shape with those. This experiment removes the confound: the burst shape and the campaign's best smooth schedule are run at the same 16-segment granularity, the same 400-step horizon, and the same seeds, with a 48-segment burst added to check whether the teeth need fine granularity, and a fixed-α arm as an anchor. All are scored on the frozen objective, the probability of crossing 92.5 unseen_mismatch within 400 steps.
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20260721_231140_schedopt_confirm 2026-07-23
Phase 3 of the schedopt campaign: the only reportable numbers. The top three schedules from the Phase-2 search plus the fixed-α baseline, each run on 150 held-out seeds never used in any earlier phase, scored on the frozen objective (m_star=92.5, k=400). The gap between search and holdout crossing probability is the winner's-curse bias and is reported, not hidden.
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20260721_222731_schedopt_bo_r4 2026-07-23
Phase 2, round 4 of the schedopt campaign: eight candidate schedules proposed by Thompson sampling from a Gaussian process fitted to every prior evaluation, scored on the frozen objective (m_star=92.5, k=400) over the shared search seed pool. Adaptivity lives between rounds only; within this manifest the eight arms are fixed before any of them runs.
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20260721_213056_schedopt_bo_r3 2026-07-23
Phase 2, round 3 of the schedopt campaign: eight candidate schedules proposed by Thompson sampling from a Gaussian process fitted to every prior evaluation, scored on the frozen objective (m_star=92.5, k=400) over the shared search seed pool. Adaptivity lives between rounds only; within this manifest the eight arms are fixed before any of them runs.
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20260721_204316_schedopt_bo_r2 2026-07-23
Phase 2, round 2 of the schedopt campaign: eight candidate schedules proposed by Thompson sampling from a Gaussian process fitted to every prior evaluation, scored on the frozen objective (m_star=92.5, k=400) over the shared search seed pool. Adaptivity lives between rounds only; within this manifest the eight arms are fixed before any of them runs.
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20260721_194647_schedopt_bo_r1 2026-07-23
Phase 2, round 1 of the schedopt campaign: eight candidate schedules proposed by Thompson sampling from a Gaussian process fitted to every prior evaluation, scored on the frozen objective (m_star=92.5, k=400) over the shared search seed pool. Adaptivity lives between rounds only; within this manifest the eight arms are fixed before any of them runs.
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20260721_171414_schedopt_design 2026-07-23
Phase 1 of the schedopt campaign: a non-adaptive scrambled-Sobol design of 24 points over the three-parameter schedule family (a0, a1 in [0,5]; gamma in [0.25,4] log-scaled), plus the frozen fixed-α control, all scored on the frozen objective (m_star=92.5, k=400). This is the unbiased response surface Phase 2's optimizer will start from; no point here is chosen by any result.
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20260721_150444_schedopt_calib 2026-07-23
Run 2026-07-21 (about 73 minutes on a single GTX 1660 Ti at two concurrent jobs; 240 models, no failures).
Phase 0 of the schedopt campaign (spec: the design spec): calibrate the objective. Eight probe schedules chart how the probability of reaching a threshold m_star by a step budget k varies across schedule shapes, so m_star, k, and the smoothing/dwell guards can be frozen before any optimization runs. Nothing is optimized here.