arXiv AI

Fine-Tuning a 7B Advisor on Free-Tier GPUs: An Adapter-Handoff Recipe and a Synthetic-Data Reliability Caution

arXiv:2504. 15610v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning a 7B language model for specialized advising is attractive in resource-constrained settings, but multi-epoch runs routinely exceed the wall-clock limits of the free-tier GPUs (Kaggle, Colab) such users rely on.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Scaling Zero-Order Pretraining through Model Sharding

arXiv:2609.37899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-order optimization (ZO) trains without backpropagation, making it relevant to forward-only hardware and non-differentiable loss, but its gradient...

By Francois Chaubard, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Chris R\'e
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Fine-Tuning and Serving Gemma 4 31B on Google Cloud TPU: A Technical Comparison with GPU Baselines

arXiv:2605. 25645v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first end-to-end demonstration of fine-tuning and serving Google's Gemma 4 31B model on TPU hardware, providing an empirical comparison of TPU and GPU platforms for large language model adaptation.

By Jatin Kishnani, Mayank Goel, Amit Singh, Pulkit Agrawal, Sairanjan Mishra
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Cacheable by Design? Training Mixture-of-Experts Routers for Locality Against the Edge Memory-Bandwidth Wall: A Pre-Registered Negative Result with a Systems Measurement Study

The paper investigates whether training Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routers can improve memory‑bandwidth locality on consumer GPUs. Using a new zero‑surgery telemetry tool, the authors measure that a large Qwen3‑235B model is bottlenecked by disk‑based expert access, and that an LRU cache can serve a majority of requests. They pre‑register experiments training 137 M‑parameter MoE models with locality‑aware losses, finding that while cache misses can drop up to 60 % (99 % static‑pin hit rate), every configuration fails to meet a strict 1 % perplexity threshold, indicating a tight coupling between cache efficiency and model quality.

By Shriniwas Ramesh Suram
arXiv AI
Jul 29

How Small Can You Go? A Controlled Study of LoRA Rank, Target Modules, and Quantization Trade-offs for Text-to-SQL on a 60M-Parameter Model

arXiv:2607. 25583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and low-bit quantization are now standard tools for adapting language models under tight compute budgets, yet their interaction is most often studied on billion-parameter models where the design space is expensive to explore.

By Mahendra Singh Rathor, Anagheem Azzam