arXiv Machine Learning

When to Retrain: An Empirical Study of Retraining Policies for Streaming ML Under Concept Drift, Budget, and Latency Constraints

arXiv:2608. 19488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production machine learning systems degrade under concept drift, yet practitioners have little principled guidance on when to retrain.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

UpgradeBench: A Decision-Centric Benchmark for Upgrading Fine-Tuned LLM Specialists

UpgradeBench is a decision‑centric longitudinal benchmark that evaluates how fine‑tuned language‑model specialists should be handled when new base‑model releases occur. It covers four consecutive Qwen releases, a continuation checkpoint, six tasks, two model sizes, and OLMo checkpoints with known training lineage, and examines whether retraining, adapter transfer, or other recovery strategies improve specialist performance. The benchmark reveals that upgrade gains vary by task and release interval, that direct adapter copying is sensitive to pretraining distance, and that teacher relabeling can recover specialists without new annotations. "whyItMatters":"The study provides actionable insights into the cost‑effective management of specialist models across model releases, showing how to balance retraining effort with performance gains."

By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

When RL Meets Adaptive Speculative Training: A Unified Training-Serving System

arXiv:2602. 06932v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Speculative decoding can significantly accelerate LLM serving, yet most deployments today disentangle speculator training from serving, treating speculator training as a standalone offline modeling problem.

By Junxiong Wang, Fengxiang Bie, Jisen Li, Zhongzhu Zhou, Zelei Shao, Yubo Wang, Yinghui Liu, Qingyang Wu, Avner May, Sri Yanamandra, Ce Zhang, Tri Dao, Percy Liang, Ben Athiwaratkun, Shuaiwen Leon Song, Chenfeng Xu, Xiaoxia Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

When Does Online Adaptation Pay on the Edge? A Leakage-Free Evaluation of Warmup, Learning-Rate Selection, and Resource Trade-offs for Time-Series Forecasting

The paper investigates when online adaptation benefits edge time‑series forecasting under distribution drift, using a leakage‑free streaming protocol on six public multivariate datasets. It shows that the warmup budget for static baselines and the choice of learning rate can bias perceived adaptation gains, and that a validation‑only procedure selecting warmup and optimizer rates yields Adam outperforming SGD with momentum in most settings. The study also examines accuracy versus adaptation‑state memory and per‑update latency for different adaptation strategies, highlighting parameter‑efficient variants that are nondominated on the memory axis.

By Takumi Fujimoto, Hiroaki Nishi
arXiv AI
Oct 5

Zephon: Elastic Determinism for Online, Stateful Foundation Model Data Loading Pipelines

Zephon is a data loader designed for foundation model training that ensures deterministic ordering of training data batches even when GPU resources change, checkpoints are resumed, or different processing backends are used. It handles online, stateful pipelines—where tokenization, packing, and mixing of samples create complex n‑to‑m transformations—by partitioning the data stream into topology‑independent lanes, serializing ordering decisions, and checkpointing only bounded in‑flight state. Experiments on text and vision‑language tasks show Zephon delivers competitive throughput while offering guarantees that existing loaders lack for such pipelines.

By Maximilian B\"other, Josh Wills, Ties Robroek, Sonnet Xu, Paul Burstein, Daniel Zayas, Cody Blakeney, Siddharth Joshi, Haoli Yin, Rishabh Adiga, Haakon Mongstad, Luke Merrick, Pratyush Maini, Ari Morcos, Matthew Leavitt, Ana Klimovic, Bogdan Gaza