arXiv AI

POET-X: Memory-efficient LLM Training by Scaling Orthogonal Transformation

arXiv:2603. 05500v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient and stable training of large language models (LLMs) remains a core challenge in modern machine learning systems.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Ladder Up, Memory Down: Low-Cost Fine-Tuning With Side Nets

The paper introduces Ladder Side Tuning (LST), a parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning method that adds a lightweight side network to large language models. LST matches QLoRA’s compute scaling while halving peak memory usage, enabling 7B‑parameter models to be fine‑tuned on a single 12 GB GPU with 2k‑token contexts without gradient checkpointing. The authors also present xLadder, a depth‑extended variant that increases effective depth through cross‑connections, allowing deeper reasoning without extra memory overhead.

By Estelle Zheng, Nathan Cerisara, S\'ebastien Warichet, Emmanuel Helbert, Christophe Cerisara
arXiv AI
Jun 10

PromptEmbedder: Efficient and Transferable Text Embedding via Dual-LLM Soft Prompting

arXiv:2605. 28066v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficacy in text embedding, yet current adaptation methods like LoRA face significant bottlenecks in computational efficiency and cross-architecture transferability.

By Yu-Che Tsai, Kuan-Yu Chen, Yuan-Hao Chen, Yu-Han Chang, Ching-Yu Tsai, Yu-Hsiang Chuang, Shou-De Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 17

Stabilizing Native Low-Rank LLM Pretraining

arXiv:2602. 12429v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models have achieved remarkable success, yet their growing parameter counts pose significant computational and memory challenges.

By Paul Janson, Edouard Oyallon, Eugene Belilovsky
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

TACO: Ternary Absolute-max Column-wise One-sparse Optimizer for LLM Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces TACO, a new optimizer for fine‑tuning large language models that drastically reduces optimizer state memory while preserving first‑order gradients. TACO selects the sign of the largest magnitude entry in each column of weight matrices, achieving a 174× reduction in persistent optimizer memory compared to AdamW8bit and a 2.9× decrease in peak training memory on OPT‑13B. This allows full‑parameter fine‑tuning of 30–32B‑parameter models on a single 80 GB GPU across multiple model families and tasks, with comparable accuracy and runtime to existing methods.

By Jichao Jiang (University of Central Florida), Cristian McGee (University of Central Florida), El Houcine Bergou (Mohammed VI Polytechnic University), Hanqin Cai (University of Central Florida), Aritra Dutta (University of Central Florida)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Accelerating the Mitigation of LLM Inference Nondeterminism Across GPU Architectures

The paper addresses the problem of non‑deterministic outputs from large language models (LLMs) when run on different GPU architectures, caused by floating‑point non‑associativity and hardware‑dependent kernel choices. It proposes a set of fixed‑configuration fused‑upcast GEMM kernels that load 16‑bit weights, upcast to FP32, and perform IEEE‑754 compliant reductions in a problem‑shape‑dependent order, ensuring identical linear‑layer outputs across NVIDIA Ampere, Ada, and Hopper GPUs. The new approach achieves 1.17–3.1× faster end‑to‑end performance than existing solutions and halves weight‑memory traffic while maintaining cross‑architecture reproducibility.

By Liam Cooper, Shinnung Jeong, Hyeran Jeon, Jeffrey Young, Hyesoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

Energy-Efficient GPU DVFS for Fine-Tuning of SLMs on Resource-constrained Embedded Devices

arXiv:2607. 05933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) on resource-constrained embedded GPU platforms is essential for energy-efficient small language model (SLM) fine-tuning, as privacy- and personalization-driven adaptation increasingly requires local execution and involves repeated forward-backward optimization over many mini-batches, making it substantially more time- and energy-intensive than single-pass inference.

By Jurn-Gyu Park, Sanzhar Zholdybayev, Aidar Amangeldi, Ademi Zhanuzakova