arXiv AI

SymbolicLight V1: Spike-Gated Dual-Path Language Modeling at High Activation Sparsity

arXiv:2605. 21333v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Natively trained spiking language models must preserve information across time while operating through sparse binary activations, a combination that has produced a persistent quality gap relative to dense Transformers.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 3

Matterhorn: Masked Time-to-First-Spike Encoding by Reassigning the Silent State for Sparse and Energy-Efficient Spiking Transformers

arXiv:2601. 22876v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) promise energy-efficient inference for large language models (LLMs), yet most reported savings rely on compute-operation counts that overlook data movement.

By Zhanglu Yan, Kaiwen Tang, Zixuan Zhu, Zhenyu Bai, Qianhui Liu, Yongxin Zhu, Weng-Fai Wong
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Breaking the Token Ceiling: Distilling Smaller, Stronger Byte Models

The paper investigates whether small models distilled from larger ones behave similarly when using byte versus token tokenization. It introduces two methods—Marginalize‑It (approximate) and End‑Of‑Token (exact)—to convert token logits to byte logits, and conducts a large‑scale study on decoder‑only dense transformers ranging from 1 billion to 1 trillion bytes of data. Results show that while token‑based models excel early, byte‑based models eventually surpass them with more compute, achieving higher performance ceilings, greater data efficiency, and lower logit storage costs.

By Kalyani Marathe, Artidoro Pagnoni, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Margaret Li, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer, Srinivasan Iyer
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Large Language Models with At Most One Spike per Neuron

The paper presents a spiking neural network (SNN) approach that uses time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding to limit each neuron to at most one spike per time window, enabling energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). A reference-based strategy is introduced to encode the four core LLM components—embedding layers, layer normalization, attention-related operations, and dropout—allowing the construction of a fully TTFS-based SNN architecture trained end-to-end. Experiments on BERT and GPT-2 show performance comparable to artificial neural network (ANN) counterparts on natural language understanding and common-sense reasoning, while achieving a 1.5‑billion‑parameter spiking LLM and providing an estimate of spike-related energy consumption.

By Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari, Richard Naud
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Fixed State, Long Reach: What a Constant-Size Cache Buys Block Diffusion at Scale

The paper investigates how block‑diffusion language models can use a constant‑size cache to enable efficient parallel decoding. By employing sequence mixers that summarize completed blocks into a reusable state and a block‑causal training objective, the authors pretrain three 3B block‑diffusion denoisers (attention, Mamba, and hybrid) on 300 B tokens. The resulting state‑space cache remains O(1) in memory and latency regardless of context length, yielding significant speed‑up and memory savings compared to traditional attention‑based caches, especially at very long sequences.

By Vaibhav Singh, Pierre-Andr\'e No\"el, Torsten Scholak, Eugene Belilovsky, Oleksiy Ostapenko
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

The Von-Neumann State-Space Transformer for neural decoding

The paper introduces the Von‑Neumann State‑Space Transformer (VN‑SST), a memory‑augmented Transformer that replaces the standard feed‑forward block with a low‑rank instruction bank. By decoding token‑specific operators from a low‑dimensional state‑space memory, VN‑SST achieves higher data‑efficiency and parameter‑efficiency on motor‑cortex neural‑decoding tasks and on small language‑model benchmarks. The model demonstrates that a compact instruction set can act as a control channel, improving performance without increasing accuracy through larger parameter counts.

By Morteza Sarafyazd