arXiv:2607. 09266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Per-layer diagnostics reveal that, at the prescribed learning rate, Lion's effective scale is 2.
arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.
The paper introduces the Drift Contract, a spectral update geometry for local learning that improves depth robustness and hyperparameter stability. By applying momentum orthogonalization with spectral step scaling to per‑layer updates, the authors achieve consistent performance across a wide range of widths and depths on CIFAR‑10 MLPs, outperforming local Adam and providing a per‑layer, input‑conditioned drift bound. The study also shows that the spectral geometry itself, rather than step‑size rules, drives the observed depth robustness, while a negative result indicates that the stability benefit is limited to non‑normalized layers.
arXiv:2502. 11034v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Loss spikes remain a persistent obstacle in large-scale language model pretraining.
arXiv:2605.06240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forward-Forward (FF) training lets each layer learn from a local goodness criterion. In cumulative-goodness variants, later layers can inheri...
arXiv:2608.29167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robustness of segmentation models is commonly assessed through input-domain perturbations, while dependence on frequency content within learned feature...
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.
arXiv:2606. 26538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Transformers are composed of uniformly stacked residual blocks, yet their deepest layers often add little value.
arXiv:2606. 06539v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Forward-Forward (FF) learning [Hinton, 2022] replaces backpropagation with strictly layer-local goodness updates.
arXiv:2607. 01984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Newer lightweight convolutional neural networks are often presented as improving predictive performance and deployment efficiency, but such claims require controlled evaluation.
arXiv:2609.14247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bird-strike mitigation at wind farms requires identifying distant birds that span only tens of pixels, so the classifier's input resolution N is a de...
LionMuon is a new optimizer that alternates between Lion’s sign-based updates and Muon’s spectral matrix-sign updates on a fixed period P, sharing a single dual-EMA momentum buffer. This design keeps the memory footprint the same as Lion and half that of AdamW while reducing the average iteration cost compared to Muon. Experiments on 124M, 355M, and 720M models show LionMuon Pareto-dominates Muon, Lion, Signum, and AdamW across datasets and architectures, achieving lower validation loss with less compute.
arXiv:2606. 12278v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network pruning reduces model size by removing less important parameters while aiming to preserve predictive performance.