arXiv Machine Learning

The Silent Freeze: Predicting When Low-Precision Training Stops Learning

arXiv:2607. 09800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training in reduced floating-point precision can silently halt learning: when a gradient-descent weight update falls below half the unit in the last place (ULP) of the weight, it rounds away and that coordinate freezes while its gradient is still nonzero.

arXiv AI
Jul 22

Federated Lightweight Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 18343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning is bottlenecked by communication: FedAvg and pseudo-gradient schemes transmit a payload that scales with the model, and gradient compression shrinks it by only a constant factor.

By Radhakrishna Achanta, Will Reed
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

HiFloat4 Format for End-To-End Reinforcement Learning Post-Training of Large Language Models

arXiv:2607. 26515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end FP4 RL post-training, in which both the rollout and training policies, including their forward and backward passes, operate at 4-bit precision.

By Hei Yi Mak, Shadan Golestan, Hoang Le, Mehran Taghian Jazi, Yunke Peng, Yaoyuan Wang, Yao Wang, Junsong Wang, Tianchi Hu, Fengchen He, Guipeng Hu, Tanzila Rahman, Anandharaju Durai Raju
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