arXiv:2609.37535v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In the softmax output layer, a rare token receives a small positive logit gradient on most steps and a much larger negative gradient on the few steps w...
By Sangsidhya Kar
StoSignSGD is a new sign‑based optimization algorithm that injects structural stochasticity into the sign operator, ensuring unbiased updates. It resolves the divergence issues of traditional SignSGD on non‑smooth objectives, achieving optimal convergence rates in convex settings and improved complexity bounds in non‑convex, non‑smooth problems. Empirical results show that StoSignSGD is stable and efficient across large language model training, outperforming AdamW and SignSGD in low‑precision regimes (FP8 and FP4) and delivering speedups and accuracy gains on models ranging from OLMo2‑370M to 7B LLMs.
By Dingzhi Yu, Rui Pan, Yuxing Liu, Difan Zou, Tong Zhang
arXiv:2608. 15448v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly rely on sampling as a driver of their own improvement, making the fidelity of their learned distributions more critical than ever.
By Nicolas Zucchet, Hyun Dong Lee, Scott Linderman
The paper proposes an information-weighted cross‑entropy loss that rescales token contributions using TF‑IDF statistics, thereby emphasizing semantically informative tokens and down‑weighting ubiquitous ones. Experiments on five decoder‑only language models (1.1B–13B parameters) show consistent reductions in memorized substring length while maintaining perplexity and downstream performance. The method is architecture‑agnostic, adds less than 3% computational overhead, and can be integrated into existing training pipelines.
By Zhijian Li, Stefan Larson, Kevin Leach
arXiv:2607. 22258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models using traditional softmax classifiers have achieved remarkable success in various classification tasks.
By Yi-Hang Zhu, Rajeev Raman, Shiqi Su, Jianyuan Sun, Xinyu Yang, Nan Xing, Huiyu Zhou
arXiv:2607. 18454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantifying the risk of rare failures in language models, such as those triggered by adversarial distribution shifts or very large-scale deployments, requires estimating probabilities far too small for random sampling.
By Nikita Y. Parulekar, Anqi Liu
arXiv:2605. 13026v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling.
By Chunsan Hong, Sanghyun Lee, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Satoshi Hayakawa, Yuhta Takida, Yuki Mitsufuji, Seungryong Kim, Jong Chul Ye
arXiv:2602. 11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries.
By Jichu Li, Xuan Tang, Difan Zou
arXiv:2608.30699v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Long-tailed distributions are prevalent in real-world semi-supervised learning (SSL), where pseudo-labels tend to favor majority classes, leading to...
By Yue Cheng, Jiajun Zhang, Xiaohui Gao, Weiwei Xing, Zhanxing Zhu
Large language models are typically trained under uniform token weighting, which allows frequent and low-information tokens to dominate learning and can increase the tendency to memorize surface-level...
arXiv:2607. 10848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models (LLMs) typically relies on trust-region masks to stabilize off-policy updates.
By Xiangxin Zhou, Jiarui Yao, Penghui Qi, Bowen Ping, Jiaqi Tang, Haonan Wang, Tianyu Pang
arXiv:2606. 02857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization is a memory-efficient alternative to backpropagation for fine-tuning large language models, but its deployment is limited by the high variance of gradient estimation.
By Liyan Tan, Yequan Zhao, Yifan Yang, Ruijie Zhang, Xinling Yu, Zheng Zhang