The paper investigates KV‑cache eviction strategies for sparse‑attention models, showing that selecting the largest attention weights is nearly optimal—closing only a median 2–5 % of the gap to full attention. It further demonstrates that differences in performance between eviction methods largely stem from memory usage, with the new training‑free ContourKV allocator outperforming state‑of‑the‑art methods in most pairwise comparisons while matching their byte‑efficiency.
By Jack Shi, Jerry Gu
arXiv:2609.22770v2 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study a parameterized hybrid ranker that fuses a dense embedding list and a sparse lexical list. The method has a small, explicit parameter vector...
By Satyanarayan Pati, Srikanth Patil
arXiv:2609. 18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention pays, at every layer and for every input, the cost of searching for whom to connect.
By Yoshiaki Takashita
arXiv:2609.00892v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning decomposes open-ended instructions into prompt-specific, flexible rubrics, making it better suited than reinforceme...
By Siyuan Li, Xinxin Song, Chen Ruinian, Jingjing Fan, Tingxiong Xiao, Yangen Hu, Ke Zeng, Jinli Suo
arXiv:2607. 07724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block-sparse attention scales long-context language models by replacing the O(N^2) softmax with a per-query top-k selection over key blocks.
By Thomas Rossi
arXiv:2606. 13392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultra-long-context capability is becoming indispensable for frontier LLMs: agentic workflows, repository-scale code reasoning, and persistent memory all require the model to jointly attend over hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, yet the quadratic cost of softmax attention makes this untenable at deployment scale.
By Xunhao Lai, Weiqi Xu, Yufeng Yang, Qiaorui Chen, Yang Xu, Lunbin Zeng, Xiaolong Li, Haohai Sun, Haichao Zhu, Vito Zhang, Pengyu Zhao
arXiv:2606. 02608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a Marchenko--Pastur (MP) random-matrix approach to pruning deep neural networks with very small post-pruning fine-tuning budgets.
By Leonid Berlyand, Theo Bourdais, Houman Owhad, Yitzchak Shmalo
arXiv:2608. 11669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning against rubrics, lists of criteria graded by an LLM judge, has become a standard way to post-train language models on tasks with no deterministic answer.
By Minglai Yang, Xinyu Guo, Utkarsh Tyagi, Mian Zhang, Razvan Dumitru, Sunjie Hou, Yunzhong He, Daniel Yue Zhang, Ying Liu
arXiv:2609.08106v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: MASTER's inter-stock multi-head attention -- the module responsible for modeling cross-sectional stock relationships -- accounts for 42.5% of model par...
By Kunhan Guo
The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) applied to small search agents, specifically training a Qwen3.5-0.8B model with Group Relative Policy Optimization and an interleaved Wikipedia-search tool on the MuSiQue dataset. Experiments varying reward shapes across three seeds show that RLVR can achieve a 3.8‑fold improvement over an untrained baseline, with the best run reaching a 0.352 average exact match. The study finds that the sparse exact‑match reward, standard in larger models, performs poorly for small models, indicating that reward design must be tailored rather than scaled down from large‑model recipes.
By Gaurisankar Jayadas, Aske Plaat, \'Alvaro Serra-G\'omez, Sandheep P
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. 01443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central difficulty in training Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) is preventing representation collapse.
By Triet M. Le