The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.
By Mingze Wang, Shuchen Zhu, Yuxin Fang, Binghui Li, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong
arXiv:2511.13254v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable capabilities across diverse domains, but their training remains resource- and time-intensive...
By Shalini Maiti, Amar Budhiraja, Bhavul Gauri, Gaurav Chaurasia, Anton Protopopov, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Michael Slater, Despoina Magka, Tatiana Shavrina, Roberta Raileanu, Yoram Bachrach
arXiv:2608. 01624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adapting a language model to a task no longer requires training all of its weights, and a line of parameter-efficient methods has driven the trainable count from billions down to a handful of scalars.
By Taeyeong Kim, Ahhyun Kim, TaeHyeon Kim, Unggi Lee
arXiv:2608. 03887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning a large language model on new data degrades what it previously learned.
By Alberto Acedo
The paper introduces MSign, an optimizer designed to prevent training instability in large language models by restoring the stable rank of weight matrices. It identifies two precursors to gradient explosions—rapid stable rank decline and increased Jacobian alignment—and proves that these jointly cause exponential gradient growth. Experiments on models ranging from 5 M to 3 B parameters show that MSign stops training failures while adding less than 7.0% computational overhead.
By Lianhai Ren, Yucheng Ding, Xiao Liu, Peng Cheng, Yeyun Gong
arXiv:2601. 16991v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Adapting large pre-trained language models to downstream tasks often entails fine-tuning millions of parameters or deploying costly dense weight updates, which hinders their use in resource-constrained environments.
By Longteng Zhang, Sen Wu, Shuai Hou, Zhengyu Qing, Zhuo Zheng, Danning Ke, Qihong Lin, Qiang Wang, Shaohuai Shi, Xiaowen Chu
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are commonly used to interpret large language models, but their reliability after pruning is unclear. This study shows that pruning’s effect on an SAE is governed by perturbation energy, a covariance-weighted norm, and that magnitude pruning distorts the representation space by ignoring activation geometry. Activation-aware pruning methods such as Wanda and SparseGPT better preserve SAE behavior, and the authors find that middle layers are especially vulnerable, leading them to propose a layer‑wise sparsity allocation that reduces perplexity for a given sparsity level.
By Suchit Gupte, Xueru Zhang, Mohammad Mahdi Khalili
arXiv:2608. 07814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models deliver high capacity at low per-token compute, but deploying them cheaply requires compressing their many expert weight matrices.
By Inesh Chakrabarti, Sourjya Roy, Bowen Bao, Thiago Crepaldi, Spandan Tiwari, Ashish Sirasao
arXiv:2602. 12429v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges.
By Paul Janson, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv:2609.40127v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Modern transformers pair impressive capabilities with substantial memory and compute demands. Low-rank weight factorization reduces both while keepin...
By Massimo Bini, Anders Christensen, Stephan Alaniz, Judah Goldfeder, Ole Winther, Yann LeCun, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Zeynep Akata
arXiv:2607. 03377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapidly growing repository of publicly available large language models (LLMs) presents significant challenges for systematic management and quantification at scale, such as model lineage tracing, licensing, and evaluation.
By Zhuoying Zhang, Ishan V. Prasad, Yuanzhe Hu, Zihang Liu, Hengrui Luo, Pu Ren, Yaoqing Yang
arXiv:2607. 20301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning has been widely used to adapt large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific tasks.
By Abigail Woodring, Adrian Chan, Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan, Sukwon Yun, Chau-Wai Wong, Tianlong Chen