arXiv Machine Learning

Rethinking Local Learning: A Cheaper and Faster Recipe for LLM Post-Training

arXiv:2605. 04913v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM post-training typically propagates task gradients through the full depth of the model.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

DRDN: Decoupled Representation Dynamic Network for From-Scratch ViT Class-Incremental Learning

Dynamic expansion methods for class-incremental learning (CIL) protect task-specific knowledge by growing dedicated tokens or subnetworks, yet our analyses suggest that classification supervision alone does not sufficiently preserve task-agnostic shared backbone representations over long incremental sequences. We identify two intertwined challenges: cross-task confusion from sequential training on predominantly current-task data, which biases decision boundaries toward recent tasks; and under-optimized shared representations in the backbone that cap long-term discriminability as tasks accumulate.

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601. 22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities.

By Shuqi Ke, Giulia Fanti
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning

arXiv:2411. 16073v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers.

By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 31

Activation Boundary Matching: Task-Informed Initialization for Low-Rank Adaptation

The paper introduces Activation Boundary Matching for Low‑Rank Adaptation (ABM‑LoRA), a task‑informed initialization strategy that uses the signs of layer‑wise pre‑activations from a brief probe adapter as targets for a fresh adapter. By training with a margin‑based hinge objective on these activation boundaries, ABM‑LoRA captures useful adaptation directions that standard LoRA initializers miss, while requiring only a few forward passes. Experiments show that ABM‑LoRA outperforms or matches existing LoRA, SVD, and gradient‑based initializers across multiple models and benchmarks, including T5‑base/GLUE, ConvNeXt‑T, Swin‑T, Qwen2.5‑1.5B, and LLaMA2‑7B.

By Dongha Lee, Jinhee Park, Minjun Kim, Junseok Kwon