arXiv Machine Learning

Learning Rate Transfer for Hybrid Transformer-SSM Architectures

arXiv:2610. 01172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study learning rate (LR) scaling for hybrid architectures combining Transformer and State-Space Model (SSM) blocks, a class adopted by several recent production language models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

From Scaling to Structured Expressivity: Rethinking Transformers for CTR Prediction

arXiv:2511. 12081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Despite massive investments in scale, deep models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction often exhibit rapidly diminishing returns -- a stark contrast to the {predictable scaling laws} seen in large language models (LLMs).

By Bencheng Yan, Yuejie Lei, Zhiyuan Zeng, Zheye Deng, Di Wang, Kaiyi Lin, Pengjie Wang, Chuan Yu, Jian Xu, Bo Zheng
arXiv AI
Sep 24

KITE: KV-Invariant Transformer Expansion for Efficient Agentic LLM Scaling

KITE (KV-Invariant Transformer Expansion) is a scaling paradigm that trains a language model from a smaller size to a larger one, saving training costs by upcycling. It places new parameters in regions that do not affect attention KV, so inference only requires prefilling KV from the smaller part, reducing inference costs. The Step Scale Transformer (SST), a two-tower decoder, demonstrates this by achieving lower training loss than comparable MoE Transformers while cutting estimated inference cost by 6.7% and 31.6%.

By Zhiheng Hu, Yixun Wei, Jian Zhou, Yizhuang Zhou, Ji Li, Xing Chen, Yang Li, Bojun Wang, Yibo Zhu, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Baseline Shape Decides the Verdict: A Controlled Re-Examination of Ternary Language Models at 60K Parameters

The study re‑examines a reported advantage of a routed ternary (1.58‑bit) language model over a full‑precision transformer at 60K parameters. By running controlled experiments with multiple seeds and a fixed training recipe, the authors find that the apparent benefit largely stems from the choice of baseline model shape rather than the ternary architecture itself. While the routed model does outperform other shapes at a larger 130M‑byte budget, its advantage diminishes when a plain gated diagonal‑SSM block is used, and the ternary penalty varies with architecture and quantization details.

By Gautam Veldanda
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Negligible in Size, Significant in Effect: On Scale Vectors in Large Language Models

The paper investigates the often-overlooked scale vectors in large language models, showing that despite their tiny size they are crucial for pre‑training performance. The authors provide theoretical insights that scale vectors mainly aid optimization rather than expressivity, and they analyze how weight decay affects different normalization layers. Building on these findings, they propose lightweight improvements—branch‑specific heterogeneity, better placement, and magnitude‑direction reparameterization—that consistently reduce loss across a range of model sizes and training settings.

By Mingze Wang, Shuchen Zhu, Yuxin Fang, Binghui Li, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong