The paper introduces Neural Spectral Capacity (NSC), a closed‑form metric derived from the singular‑value spectrum of weight matrices that can be computed solely from a network’s architectural specification. Unlike traditional measures such as #Params and #FLOPs, NSC captures architectural structure (depth, width, head, FFN allocations) and can be evaluated without instantiating the model, data, or gradients. Using a dynamic‑programming solver (NSC‑DP), the authors demonstrate that NSC can efficiently identify architectures that outperform existing training‑free proxies across Transformer and CNN families, and achieve state‑of‑the‑art results in tasks such as WikiText‑103 and commonsense reasoning with LLaMA‑7B.
whyItMatters":"NSC provides a fast, architecture‑only proxy that outperforms conventional metrics and training‑free proxies, enabling more effective design and pruning of large models without costly training or data."
By Chenyu Zhu, Ruoyu Zhao, Zhichao Lu
arXiv:2607. 22489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a widely adopted technique for efficient neural network fine-tuning, decomposing model updates into low-rank matrices.
By Jianghui Wang, Silong Yong, Francesco Orabona, Marco Canini, Katia P. Sycara, Yaqi Xie
arXiv:2608.30384v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: By introducing RSLM (Rotated Scaled Lloyd-Max), a family of training-free vector quantization codecs compressing embeddings to 1--4 bits per dimension,...
By Rastislav Lenhardt, Teodora Dobos, Thomas Vecchiato, Jiri Isa, Igor Ginzburg
arXiv:2510. 06945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by the growing interest in quantum machine learning, in particular quantum neural networks (QNNs), we study how recently introduced evaluation metrics based on the Fisher information matrix (FIM) are effective for predicting their training and prediction performance.
By Lorenzo Pastori, Veronika Eyring, Mierk Schwabe
arXiv:2609.30738v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: KV cache eviction methods such as SnapKV and PyramidKV rank tokens solely by mean attention over a small observation window. We study a unified score,...
By Tianfang Xie, Wei Zhu
arXiv:2606. 14187v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale neural network training increasingly relies on matrix-aware optimizers that exploit the structure of weight parameters beyond element-wise adaptation.
By Kaiwen Chen, Shuhai Zhang, Qiuwu Chen, Zimo Liu, Linxiao Li, Ying Sun, Yuchen Li, Yifan Zhang, Bo Han, Mingkui Tan
The paper evaluates ten deep learning optimizers across models ranging from 0.1B to 1.2B parameters and varying data-to-model ratios, highlighting that fair comparisons require rigorous hyperparameter tuning and end-of-training evaluations. It finds that claimed speedups over AdamW are lower than advertised, dropping to only 1.1× for the largest models, and that intermediate checkpoint comparisons can mislead due to learning‑rate decay. The study shows that matrix‑based optimizers like Muon and Soap achieve the highest speedups, but these benefits diminish as model size increases.
By Kaiyue Wen, David Hall, Tengyu Ma, Percy Liang
arXiv:2510. 06048v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective data selection is essential for pretraining large language models (LLMs), enhancing efficiency and improving generalization to downstream tasks.
By Jie Hao, Rui Yu, Wei Zhang, Huixia Wang, Jie Xu, Mingrui Liu
arXiv:2606. 19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning -- data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design.
By Richard Yi Da Xu
arXiv:2606. 12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines.
By Franz Louis Cesista, Katherine Crowson, C\'edric Simal, Stella Biderman
arXiv:2607. 23050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how loss decreases as models, data, and compute grow, but they do not answer a prior question: for a fixed task, what is the minimum model capacity required to solve it?
By Byeong Hoon Yoon
arXiv:2603. 20990v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hard-negative source selection for dense retrieval is usually decided only after fine-tuning and downstream evaluation.
By Aarush Sinha, Rahul Seetharaman, Aman Bansal