Why does pretraining or not matter in the ISPD 2023 paper? The circuit_training repo, as noted in the rebuttal of the rebuttal by the ISPD 2023 paper authors, claims training from scratch is "comparable or better" than fine-tuning the pre-trained model. So no matter your opinion on the importance of the pretraining step, this result isn't replicable, at which point the ball is in Google's court to release code/checkpoints to show otherwise.
The quick-start guide in the repo that said you don't have to pre-train for the sample test case, meaning that you can validate your setup without pre-training. That does not mean you don't need to pre-train! Again, the paper talks at length about the importance of pre-training.
>Results
>Ariane RISC-V CPU
>View the full details of the Ariane experiment on our details page. With this code we are able to get comparable or better results training from scratch as fine-tuning a pre-trained model.
The paper includes a graph showing that it takes longer for Ariane to train without pre-training however the results in the end are the same.
Sometimes training from scratch is able to match the results of pre-training, given ~5X more time to converge. Other times, though, it never does as well as a pre-trained model, converging to a worse final result.
This isn't too surprising -- the whole point of the method is to be able to learn from experience.
