SureStop

Stop bad training runs early, with a stated bound on how often you stop one that would have ended well. You pick α. The rule kills runs so that the expected fraction of runs that were good and got killed stays at or below α.

Every pruner in common use (median, percentile, successive halving, Hyperband) is a heuristic, and none says how often it kills a run that would have finished well. This one does, under a condition you can check: the runs you calibrate on and the runs you judge must come from the same random process.

It was measured on 400 real LoRA fine-tuning runs under a pre-registered protocol. The curves are in this repository, and a script checks that the package reproduces the recorded numbers exactly.

Install

pip install surestop            # numpy + scipy
pip install "surestop[optuna]"  # adds the Optuna pruner

Use

Plain numpy, on any training loop:

from surestop import KillRule

# completed_curves: array of shape (runs, evaluations), lower is better
rule = KillRule(alpha=0.05, good_threshold=2.16, min_peek=17).fit(completed_curves)

rule.should_kill(curve_so_far)     # True -> stop this run now
rule.kill_step(full_curve)         # where it would have fired, or None
rule.evaluate(held_out_curves)     # false kills, joint rate, savings

With Optuna, the first n_calibration trials run unpruned to calibrate, then the rule freezes:

import optuna
from surestop import ConformalPruner

study = optuna.create_study(sampler=optuna.samplers.RandomSampler(),
                            pruner=ConformalPruner(n_calibration=60, alpha=0.05))

Pass maximize=True (or a direction="maximize" study) when higher is better.

The rule

A run is good if its final value ends at or below a threshold τ. At every evaluation, a predictor forecasts the final value from the curve so far. The default predictor is the latest observed value.

To calibrate, take n runs that have already finished. For each good one, record its worst moment: the largest gap between forecast and τ at any evaluation. Runs that are not good contribute nothing. Set λ to the ⌈(1−α)(n+1)⌉-th smallest of these scores. A new run is killed at the first evaluation where its forecast exceeds τ + λ.

This is conformal risk control on the loss "good and killed". Taking the worst moment across all evaluations means one threshold covers every look at a run, so there is no correction for multiple looks. The guarantee needs the calibration runs and the new runs to be exchangeable. Random sampling gives that. Adaptive samplers such as TPE do not.

What was measured

Experiment CC-03c, pre-registered before any run finished:

• Runs: 400 LoRA fine-tunes of Qwen2.5-0.5B on dolly-15k, 750 steps each, validation loss measured 50 times per run.
• Configs: i.i.d. draws from a frozen hyperparameter prior (docs/hyperparameter-prior.md).
• τ: pinned from an earlier pool before the first run landed.
• Splits: two, one random and one past-to-future by night, each about half calibration and half test.

The pre-registered rule used a fitted power-law predictor. On both splits it kept the bound and saved about half the evaluation compute:

split	false kills	joint rate (95% CI)	eval compute saved
random	13 of 200	6.5% (3.5–10.9%)	52.2%
past-to-future	11 of 203	5.4% (2.7–9.5%)	52.8%

A rule that kills every run immediately was scored by the same gate and failed on both splits.

The flaw that run found: every kill fired at the 3rd of 50 evaluations. Early rankings only match final rankings from about evaluation 18. The rule stayed within budget because the bound held. The fitted power law ranked runs worse than the latest observed value at every early evaluation.

What this package ships instead, and what the reproduction script checks:

predictor	hold until	random split	past-to-future split	2000 resplits
last value	none	18 of 200 (9.0%), 78% saved	7 of 203 (3.4%), 75% saved	joint 5.0%, breach 8.5%
last value	eval 18	18 of 200 (9.0%), 57% saved	7 of 203 (3.4%), 56% saved	joint 5.0%, breach 8.6%

The random split's 18 of 200 is a breach. It sits at the 95th percentile of that rule's own resplit distribution, whose mean is 5.0%, so it reads as a split tail rather than a leak. A correct rule at this sample size lands on a breach in about 7% of splits. The held version was chosen after seeing these 400 runs, so its numbers are a hypothesis. It halves how often the single best run is killed at the same budget. Its confirmation needs a fresh pool.

Full account: docs/writeup.md. Run the check yourself:

python reproduce/reproduce_cc03c.py

What the bound does not cover

• It needs exchangeable runs. With a random or quasi-random sampler the bound holds. With TPE, Gaussian-process or CMA-ES samplers it does not. The Optuna pruner warns once and carries on, but do not rely on the bound there.
• It bounds the joint rate rather than the share of good runs killed. When good runs are rare, a large share of them can still die: about a third in the measurement above, mostly borderline ones. Lower α if that matters.
• An estimated τ gives a measured bound rather than a proven one. good_quantile estimates τ from the calibration runs. Simulations put the realized rate at 0.88 to 0.97 times α. Pass a real good_threshold when you have one.
• α = 0.05 needs at least 19 calibration runs, and the certified threshold gets loose with few good runs. Sweeps of a few dozen trials are too small for this.
• One setting only so far. One model, one dataset, one horizon.

Layout

path	what
src/surestop/	KillRule (numpy/scipy) and ConformalPruner (Optuna)
tests/	the bound holds on synthetic exchangeable runs, and the same assertion fails on a rule that leaks 2× its budget
reproduce/	the 400 curves, the pre-registered splits and targets, the script, and its committed output
docs/	the write-up, the prior-art sweep, and the frozen hyperparameter prior the curves were drawn from
optunahub/	the package as an OptunaHub registry entry

Related work

Calibrating a stop threshold on a predictor with a conformal guarantee is an established pattern. Xie et al. (arXiv:2602.13935) use the same device, a threshold on the maximum of a running score calibrated on one class only, to stop LLM reasoning traces. Related work does the same for mixed-integer solvers and LLM agent episodes. As far as a search found, nobody has applied it to pruning training runs, and no major tuning library ships a pruner with a stated error guarantee. docs/prior-art.md has the sweep.

Citing

Concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22726440, which always resolves to the newest version. CITATION.cff has the full entry. The curves are a measurement, released under the same MIT licence as the code.