arXiv Machine Learning

Optimizer Memory Makes Shuffle Order a First-Order Source of Fine-Tuning Noise

arXiv:2606. 29554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shuffle order can be a larger source of fine-tuning noise than a memoryless analysis predicts: fixed-clock optimizer memory makes local equal-multiset contrasts first order in the learning rate rather than second order, and the resulting order channel can be large enough for a single seed to flip a close A/B comparison.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

Memory Savings at What Cost? A Study of Alternatives to Backpropagation

arXiv:2506. 21833v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forward-mode automatic differentiation (FmAD) and zero-order (ZO) optimization are increasingly proposed as memory-efficient, backpropagation-free alternatives for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, yet their benefits are typically evaluated only against standard backpropagation (BP), omitting memory-efficient variants such as activation checkpointing.

By Kunjal Panchal, Sunav Choudhary, Yuriy Brun, Hui Guan
arXiv AI
Jul 7

HiFA4: Training-Free 4-bit FlashAttention on Ascend HIF4 NPUs for LLM Inference

arXiv:2607. 04302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HiFA4, a post-training operator-level design that executes both QK^T and PV in FlashAttention as 4-bit HIF4 Cube GEMMs for LLM inference on Ascend NPUs, while maintaining the online softmax state in FP16.

By Hui Dong, Yanzhao Li, Jie Gao, Chunlu Li, Zhiyuan Zhang, Yupeng Sun, Zhenyuan Chen, Zhiqiang Zou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 5

Asymptotic-Preserving A Posteriori Analysis of Diffusion and Flow-Matching Samplers

Diffusion and flow-matching samplers integrate a learned probability-flow ODE from a large noise scale down to a small terminal floor $σ_{\min}$, at which the score is stiff and the flow develops a boundary layer. We treat $σ_{\min}$ as a singular-perturbation parameter and determine which fixed-step samplers are asymptotic-preserving (AP), that is, stable and uniformly accurate as $σ_{\min}\to0$, casting the criteria as an a posteriori audit: residual functionals with $σ_{\min}$-uniform coefficients, computable on a pretrained checkpoint without ground-truth scores or exact trajectories.