arXiv Machine Learning

CausalGate: Causal Importance Distillation for Transformer Module Pruning

arXiv:2607. 22720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing adaptive inference methods for Large Language Models rely on observational heuristics, such as hidden-state similarity or activation magnitudes, to drop redundant modules.

arXiv AI
Aug 18

SAPE: Sandwich Adapters for Parameter Efficiency in Large Language Model Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2608. 15360v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has substantially reduced the hardware cost of adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) by decreasing the number of trainable parameters, recent studies have sought to further improve PEFT through parameter sharing.

By Mohammad Aref Jafari-Raddani, Morteza Mohajjel Kafshdooz
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Sparse Token Routing in Efficient Transformers

The paper introduces Sparse Token Routing in Efficient Transformers, evaluating a two-stream Transformer (SEWN) that routes tokens through either lightweight or full-capacity processing via a learned gate. Experiments show that routing causes negligible accuracy change compared to parameter-matched baselines, and that the effectiveness of the gate’s token-importance signal depends on its learning method. A static lexicon-seeded prior fails a counterfactual faithfulness test on BoolQ, whereas a fully contextual gate achieves highly significant separation ($p<10^{-10}$) on both evaluated tasks without altering task accuracy.

By Sai Krishna Arthanari, JaeHyeong Chang, Chengzhe Sun, Siwei Lyu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Pruning Laws for Large Language Models

arXiv:2504.04342v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling up model parameters and training data consistently improves the performance of large language models (LLMs), but at the cost of rapidly gro...

By Ayan Sengupta, Siddhant Chaudhary, Tanmoy Chakraborty
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Syntax vs. Semantics: How Transformers Learn Deep Dependencies

The paper investigates how transformers acquire deep semantic dependencies, proposing a mechanistic framework that frames learning as a competition between surface statistics and deep semantics. It identifies a "Gradient Starvation" effect that suppresses error signals for sparse semantic dependencies early in training, delaying structural reasoning until a sudden phase transition. The study also explains the success of Chain-of-Thought strategies and introduces a topology‑aligned contrastive objective that improves variable binding performance by more than twice the gain of standard fine‑tuning.

By Jiangrui Zhao, Xiaoting Du