The paper presents practical training recipes for looped language models, showing that a compute‑efficient pipeline can reduce the training budget from 7.7 T tokens to 310 B tokens while maintaining strong reasoning performance. In controlled experiments, a 1.4 B LoopLM outperforms a parameter‑matched dense model on 12 benchmarks, achieving significant gains on GSM8K, MATH, and DROP, and approaches a 3.9 B dense model at matched inference compute. The authors also provide a minimal recipe to convert pretrained dense models into looped ones, demonstrating improvements on Qwen3‑1.7B‑Base across multiple data regimes.
By Andrei Marchenko, Viacheslav Bezrukov, Oleg Kashurin, Inessa Fedorova, Dmitry Bocharov, Yuliana Shakhvalieva, Maria Tikhonova, Valerii Ternovskii
arXiv:2508. 10123v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT).
By Maxime Heuillet, Yufei Cui, Boxing Chen, Audrey Durand, Prasanna Parthasarathi
arXiv:2609.38149v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Transformer language models (LMs) are feed-forward: deep-layer representations are never fed back to shallower layers, and the only pathway for informa...
By Dor Tirosh, Ido Amos, Mor Geva
Instella‑MoE is a fully open Mixture‑of‑Experts language model with 16 billion total parameters and 2.8 billion active parameters per token, trained from scratch on AMD Instinct GPUs. It incorporates a sparsely activated MoE design with Gated Multi‑head Latent Attention and FarSkip‑Collective connectivity, and follows a multi‑stage pipeline that includes pre‑training, long‑context extension, supervised fine‑tuning, direct preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with Multi‑Teacher On‑Policy Distillation. The model achieves an average score of 76.7 on pre‑training benchmarks and 73.2 on instruction‑following, reasoning, math, coding, and chat benchmarks, outperforming comparable fully open and open‑weight models, and its full training pipeline, weights, and code are released for reproducibility.
By Jiang Liu, Sudhanshu Ranjan, Prakamya Mishra, Yonatan Dukler, Gowtham Ramesh, Jialian Wu, Ximeng Sun, Wen Xie, Chaojun Hou, Vikram Appia, Zhenyu Gu, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
arXiv:2609.36636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Looped language models (LoopLMs) increase computational depth through parameter sharing, offering a path to scale inference computation without adding...
By Xinlin Zhuang, Siyuan Wang, Imran Razzak, Weiyang Liu
arXiv:2402. 14035v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Knowledge distillation from foundation models to compact domain models is challenging due to substantial gaps in capacity, architecture, and modality.
By Zichang Liu, Qingyun Liu, Yuening Li, Liang Liu, Anshumali Shrivastava, Shuchao Bi, Lichan Hong, Ed H. Chi, Zhe Zhao
arXiv:2610.35556v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Looped Transformers increase computation per token by repeatedly applying a shared backbone, offering a way to improve language modeling and downstream...
By Feichen Song, Boyi Zeng, Yiqin Hao, Shixiang Song, He Li, Yizhou Yang, Zitong Wang, Yifan Liu, Ziwei He, Zhouhan Lin
The Asymmetric Looped Transformer (AsymLoop) separates context encoding from state refinement by using a single-pass causal encoder to produce fixed global key-value caches and a weight-tied recurrent decoder to generate local key-values from its evolving state. Joint attention over both sources allows each update to combine persistent contextual information with the current intermediate state. Experiments on FineWeb-Edu across models from 60M to 1B show lower validation perplexity and higher downstream accuracy than full-loop models, with a 1B model improving zero-shot commonsense reasoning accuracy from 49.58% to 50.85%.
By Cheng Liang, Tengfei Zhang, Wenjie DU, Jianyu Wu, Changlian Ma, Shuchen Pu, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Zhouhan Lin
arXiv:2606. 01934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve remarkable performance via extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet this lengthy process incurs substantial inference overhead.
By Minghui Zheng, Hongxu Chen, Huimin Ren, Hongsheng Xin, Xiaoyang Qu, Ze Wang, Shuling Yang, Ziyu Peng, Kaike Zhang, Pan Zhou, Kun Zhan
arXiv:2607. 22577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven their success, yet dense Transformers couple capacity and computation: every parameter is activated for every token, making training and inference costs grow linearly with model size-a critical bottleneck as models approach trillion-parameter regimes.
By Xin Yang, Yemin Wang, Mingda Liu, Letian Li, Shuaishuai Cao, Zhengxiao He, Ryan Dong
IronLLM-0.6B is a 654‑million‑parameter language model engineered for efficient on‑device inference, featuring a hybrid attention architecture, X‑MTP multi‑token prediction, and a lightweight verification head that yields a 1.48× decoding speedup. Trained on roughly 6.2 trillion tokens with a quality‑oriented pipeline and further refined via Multi‑Domain On‑Policy Distillation, the model adopts an Instruct‑Only design to meet low‑latency requirements. A lighter variant, IronLLM‑0.6B‑Light, replaces RMSNorm with Dynamic Tanh and streamlines costly components to enhance inference and quantization efficiency, offering a strong performance‑efficiency trade‑off for resource‑constrained deployment.
By Changdi Yang, Fengquan Jiao, Haochih Lin, Haoran Yang, Jing Xiao, Liangyu Huo, Suxin Lu, Tiance Chen, Wei Liu, Yinggan Xu, Yunxiang Lu, Zai Zheng, Zhirui Xie, Zhongyang Che, Ziyan Tang, Zuoxiang Zhao, Jian Yao
The paper investigates three fusion paradigms—Merge, Mix RL, and multi‑teacher on‑policy distillation (MOPD)—for consolidating reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) across multiple domains. Experiments across model scales and a multi‑domain benchmark show that while overall performance differences are small, significant gaps can appear on specific tasks, and each method exhibits distinct training dynamics and constraints. Practical guidelines are offered: Merge for cheap fusion when experts exist, Mix RL for unified training with adjustable domain mixtures, and MOPD when preserving domain‑specific gains is paramount.
By Siye Wu, Kai Yang, Yuchen Cai, Xin Xu, Peng-Yuan Wang, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashun Liu, Jiafei Lyu, Yangkun Chen, Saiyong Yang, Yanghua Xiao