This survey reviews tensor methods applied to large language models, framing them through a seven‑stage lifecycle (tokenization, embeddings, pre‑training, adaptation, compression, inference, interpretability) and a component view (embeddings, attention, feed‑forward networks). It offers unified notation, theoretical foundations, and comparative analyses of tensorization strategies for Transformer components, while highlighting evaluation protocol differences and model scale effects. The paper also introduces a new metric, ρ_gap, to quantify the gap between theoretical memory savings and actual system‑level speedup, and connects tensor techniques to related efficiency and probabilistic methods.
By Matvei Tarasov, Salman Ahmadi-Asl, Andre L. F. de Almeida, Andrzej Cichocki
arXiv:2606. 03465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training compression is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) under tight resource constraints.
By Artur Zagitov, Alexander Miasnikov, Maxim Krutikov, Vladimir Aletov, Gleb Molodtsov, Nail Bashirov, Artem Tsedenov, Aleksandr Beznosikov
Post-training compression is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) under tight resource constraints. Tensor decompositions have emerged as a promising direction, offering compact parameterizations well suited to Transformer weight structures.
arXiv:2607.12550v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache has become the dominant memory cost of transformer inference: it grows with batch size, context length, and depth, a...
By Rahul Krishnan, Volker Schulz
arXiv:2608. 13426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based language models achieve strong performance but incur substantial inference cost due to repeated high-dimensional matrix multiplications.
By Zixuan Lan, Yanhong Li, Jiawei Zhou
arXiv:2505. 18227v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks.
By Zhenglun Kong, Yize Li, Fanhu Zeng, Lei Xin, Shvat Messica, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Manolis Kellis, Hao Tang, Marinka Zitnik
arXiv:2510. 20535v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation or chain-of-thought reasoning have led to longer contexts and increased inference costs.
By Hippolyte Pilchen, Edouard Grave, Patrick P\'erez
arXiv:2607. 12550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key-value (KV) cache has become the dominant memory cost of transformer inference.
By Rahul Krishnan, Volker Schulz
The paper investigates how to effectively pre‑train language models when the data budget is limited but compute is plentiful. It shows that increasing model size only improves performance up to an optimal point, after which overfitting degrades generalization, and that this optimal size varies with both the data budget and downstream tasks. To overcome the inefficiencies of standard Transformers in this regime, the authors propose recursive Transformers that reuse a shared block across depth and employ factorized embeddings, achieving better results than standard models on 10M–100M word pre‑training budgets and competitive performance with BabyLM Challenge 2025 winners.
By Serdar G\"ulbahar, Lukas Edman, Alexander Fraser
arXiv:2608.29034v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: A wide range of methods have been proposed for interpreting language models, delivering important insights into their inner workings. However, differ...
By Zhang Enyan, R. Thomas McCoy
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:2607. 15232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tokenizer fixed at the start of pre-training allocates vocabulary in proportion to the pre-training corpus, reflecting the deployment priorities at that time.
By Jimmy T. H. Smith, Tarek Dakhran, Alberto Cabrera, Simon S. Lee, Paul Pak, Aditya Tadimeti, Tim Seyde, Maxime Labonne, Alexander Amini, Mathias Lechner