Definition
Plain language
One full pass through a dataset during training.
As stated in the literature
A unit of training schedule, often used as a boundary for consolidation operations like slow-update passes in SkillOpt or for triggering Auto-Dreamer-style memory consolidation.
Also called: epochs
Why it matters: It's a natural unit for scheduling training events like learning-rate drops, checkpointing, and consolidation steps, and it's a quick proxy for how much the model has seen.
For example, if you train on a million examples and finish looking at every one of them once, you've completed one epoch.
Heard on the show
“Train a LoRA for one epoch on a single GPU.”Episode 026 — What RL Actually Does to Language Models, at the Token Level