arXiv Machine Learning

Dual-guided Hierarchical Edge Localization for Large-scale Optimal Transport Across Dimensions

The paper introduces HELLO, a hierarchical solver for large‑scale discrete optimal transport that reduces the problem to edge localization guided by dual potentials. HELLO uses a coarse‑to‑fine initialization across a recursive subsampling hierarchy and a refinement step that inserts the largest dual violators until a KKT residual tolerance is met, achieving linear memory usage. Experiments show that HELLO outperforms strong baselines by an order of magnitude in runtime while attaining lower transport objectives, and it scales to over a million samples in high‑dimensional settings, supporting various OT variants.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

FluxBin: Flexible LUT-based Ultra-low-bit LLM Inference by Algorithm-Kernel Synergy

arXiv:2608. 15602v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While binary quantization theoretically promises extreme compression and acceleration for Large Language Models (LLMs), existing research often overlooks the necessity of specialized hardware kernels, thus failing to unleash the full acceleration potential due to persistent reliance on expensive floating-point arithmetic or runtime dequantization overheads.

By Qingyao Yang, Runming Yang, He Xiao, Wendong Xu, Junyu Chen, Haobo Liu, Chenchen Ding, Ruihan Hu, Yik-Chung Wu, Ngai Wong
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

FlashBoB: I/O-Efficient Exact Backward-over-Backward for Softmax Attention

FlashBoB introduces an I/O‑efficient algorithm for exact backward‑over‑backward (BoB) in softmax attention, enabling precise second‑order differentiation without large intermediate tensors. By exploiting a hierarchical affine structure, the method confines computation to on‑chip tiles and limits off‑chip memory traffic, achieving θ(N² d²/M) HBM usage. Experiments show FlashBoB scales to sequence lengths of 262K on a single A100 GPU, outperforming prior exact baselines and FlashBack by up to 6.3×.

By Anthony Givans, Michael Crawshaw, Mingrui Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Dense Structural Compression of Transformers via Gauge-Correct Channel Removal

The paper introduces GaugeLasso, a method that applies symmetric group‑lasso penalties to transformer channels during training, enabling entire tensor slices to be zeroed out while maintaining dense tensors for GPU efficiency. By calibrating channel penalties based on inference utility per compute, the network self‑organizes into depth‑dependent structural profiles that can be dramatically smaller than the original architecture, achieving up to 255‑fold compression on a polynomial division task and outperforming hand‑designed baselines on language modeling and autoencoding benchmarks. The approach also accelerates training and reveals over‑provisioned axes that guide subsequent design iterations.

By Jed A. Duersch, Na\"im Es-Sebbani, Nathana\"el Haas, Zied Bouraoui
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 11

A Riemannian Approach to Low-Rank Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606. 12120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank optimal transport (OT) mitigates the quadratic scaling of classical solvers, yet existing approaches rely heavily on first-order mirror-descent updates that require careful hyperparameter tuning and ignore the optimization landscape's curvature.

By Pratik Jawanpuria, Bamdev Mishra
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

StoSignSGD: Unbiased Structural Stochasticity Fixes SignSGD for Training Large Language Models

StoSignSGD is a new sign‑based optimization algorithm that injects structural stochasticity into the sign operator, ensuring unbiased updates. It resolves the divergence issues of traditional SignSGD on non‑smooth objectives, achieving optimal convergence rates in convex settings and improved complexity bounds in non‑convex, non‑smooth problems. Empirical results show that StoSignSGD is stable and efficient across large language model training, outperforming AdamW and SignSGD in low‑precision regimes (FP8 and FP4) and delivering speedups and accuracy gains on models ranging from OLMo2‑370M to 7B LLMs.

By Dingzhi Yu, Rui Pan, Yuxing Liu, Difan Zou, Tong Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 16

Optimal Transport for Machine Learners

arXiv:2505. 06589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern machine learning repeatedly manipulates probability measures: empirical datasets, generated samples, latent distributions, class-conditional laws, particle systems, weights of wide networks and attention patterns.

By Gabriel Peyr\'e