arXiv Computation and Language

Design of the IBM Granite 5.0 TurboCTC ASR Model

The paper introduces Granite 5.0 TurboCTC, a 470 million‑parameter encoder‑only ASR model that balances speed and accuracy. Its architecture combines pyramidal temporal subsampling, block‑diagonal self‑attention, and intermediate prediction conditioning within Conformer blocks. Training relies solely on public data, employs a Muon optimizer, and uses balanced sampling, while inference is accelerated by replacing 1×1 convolutions with linear layers and optimizing attention calculations.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

UniPrefill: Universal Long-Context Prefill Acceleration via Block-wise Dynamic Sparsification

UniPrefill is a prefill‑acceleration framework that works with virtually any model architecture, directly speeding up token‑level computation. It is implemented as a continuous‑batching operator and extends vLLM’s scheduling to support prefill‑decode co‑processing and tensor parallelism. The method delivers up to a 2.1× speedup in Time‑to‑First‑Token, with gains growing as concurrent requests increase.

By Qihang Fan, Huaibo Huang, Zhiying Wu, Bingning Wang, Ran He
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Attention Quantization for Tabular Foundation Models

The paper introduces a quantization technique for tabular foundation models that focuses on converting queries, keys, and values to FP8 and employing explicit FP8 matrix multiplication to accelerate attention calculations. It emphasizes aligning quantization errors between training and test rows to avoid accuracy loss, and demonstrates up to 1.7× speedup over 16‑bit kernels with no significant accuracy degradation on TabPFN‑v3 and TabICLv2 across TabArena and BeyondArena.

By Jonas M. K\"ubler, Benjamin J\"ager, Klemens Fl\"oge, Noah Hollmann, Frank Hutter
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

On the Design of Qwen3.8-Next Architecture: Evaluation, Efficiency, and Training Stability

arXiv:2608.30320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe the architecture and ablations of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 125B parameters, 6B activated per token, and a...

By Zihan Qiu, Zekun Wang, Xiao Li, Yanpeng Li, Yang Xu, Yixuan Wang, Huaqing Zhang, Rui Men, Bochao Mao, Chengruidong Zhang, Fan Zhou, Hao Luo, Haofeng Huang, Haoran Lian, Haoyan Huang, Hongqing Chen, Jianwei Zhang, Jing Xu, Junjie Wang, Langshi Chen, Liangyu Wang, Linlang Jiang, Man Yuan, Minmin Sun, Peng Jin, Siqi Zhang, Siyu Wang, Xingzhang Ren, Yakai Wang, Yi Zhang, Yiming Dong, Yizhong Cao, Yubo Ma, Yunfei Mao, Bo Zheng, Dayiheng Liu
arXiv AI
Jun 12

MiniMax Sparse Attention

arXiv:2606. 13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale.

By Xunhao Lai, Weiqi Xu, Yufeng Yang, Qiaorui Chen, Yang Xu, Lunbin Zeng, Xiaolong Li, Haohai Sun, Haichao Zhu, Vito Zhang, Pengyu Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

MONA: Muon Optimizer with Nesterov Acceleration for Scalable Language Model Training

MONA is a new optimizer that extends the Muon optimizer by adding a Nesterov‑style acceleration term derived from an exponential moving average of gradient differences. The paper provides a convergence analysis showing that this term offers curvature‑aware corrections while maintaining Muon’s spectral‑norm regularization. Empirical results demonstrate that MONA outperforms both Muon and AdamW on Mixture‑of‑Experts pretraining across models ranging from 1 B to 68 B parameters, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on downstream benchmarks after fine‑tuning the largest model.

By Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Hongtao Xu, Jiaqi Zhang, Yifan Lu, Yerui Sun, Yuchen Xie, Xunliang Cai
arXiv AI
Sep 30

LoopICL: Looping a single transformer block to solve tabular tasks

LoopICL is a transformer architecture that loops a single block to address tabular tasks. It separates parameter count from computational depth by using a cell stream for per‑cell features and a row stream for in‑context examples, refined via within‑column and cross‑column attention. During pre‑training, varying loop counts and a learned exit‑gate allow the model to adjust inference depth at test time, achieving competitive performance with TabICLv2 while using about 90% fewer parameters.

By Amir Rezaei Balef, Katharina Eggensperger