arXiv AI

DLR: Zero-Inference-Cost Latent Residuals for Low-Rank Pre-Training

arXiv:2606. 28932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have driven recent progress in language and multimodal AI, yet pre-training them at scale is prohibitively expensive.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

Stabilizing Native Low-Rank LLM Pretraining

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 AI
Jul 21

Sparsity-Aware Low-Rank Representation for Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

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
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Learning Functional Subspaces for Neural Network Compression

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 AI
Sep 7

Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference

The paper demonstrates that layer dropout, also known as stochastic depth, can be effectively used in state‑of‑the‑art large language model (LLM) training. By optimizing the layer distribution, schedule, and optimizer settings, the authors show that layer dropout can reduce training loss while saving up to 25 % of training FLOPs. Additionally, layer dropout enables post‑training optimizations such as early exit and self‑speculative decoding, achieving up to 1.5× inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss across models ranging from 271 M to 8.2 B parameters and datasets up to 160 B tokens.

By Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Gavia Gray, Gurpreet Gosal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Dominant-Layer ZO: A Single Layer Dominates Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of LLMs

arXiv:2606. 05516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization enables memory-efficient fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) using only forward passes, but it remains unclear how useful adaptation is distributed across layers.

By Wanhao Yu, Ziyan Wang, Zheng Wang, Abeer Matar Almalky, Yihang Zuo, Shuteng Niu, Sen Lin, Adnan Siraj Rakin, Deliang Fan, Li Yang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

SHIFT-LLM: Distribution Shift Correction in Depth-Pruned LLMs

SHIFT-LLM is a training‑free post‑pruning correction framework that inserts a Linear Residual Adapter (LRA) at each depth‑pruned site in large language models. Each LRA preserves the original residual identity while adding a lightweight affine correction calibrated via closed‑form least‑squares regression on a small held‑out set, thereby approximating the hidden state that would have been produced by the removed block. Experiments across multiple model families and benchmarks show that SHIFT‑LLM consistently recovers accuracy lost to depth pruning, achieving gains up to +15.7 points on Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct with only a few hundred calibration samples and no gradient computation.

By Ali Bahri, Hang Li, Hongliang Li, Zhitang Chen