arXiv Machine Learning

A Feature-Major Codebook for Memory-Efficient Sparse-Binary Self-Organizing Maps: Scaling a MEDLINE Atlas to 1.05 Million Neurons on a Single Consumer GPU

The paper presents a memory‑efficient sparse‑binary self‑organising map (SOM) that scales a MEDLINE atlas to over a million neurons on a single consumer GPU. By re‑ordering the codebook into a feature‑major layout, the authors accelerate the best‑matching‑unit search by 4.5–8.5× without increasing quantisation error, enabling training of a 1,048,576‑neuron SOM in 72 s on a 24 GB GPU. The approach outperforms existing cuSPARSE and CPU‑based SOM implementations, achieving the largest SOM reported to date and demonstrating that resolution limits are computational rather than data‑driven.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

From 80x to 385x: A Best-Matching-Unit Search at the L2 Roof, Measured Against a Symmetrically Tuned Baseline

The paper reports a comprehensive tuning of both a novel sparse self‑organizing map algorithm (SparseBin) and its baseline cuSPARSE implementation. By optimizing four key levers—tile size, tile‑membership clustering, neuron‑axis chunking, and vectorised loads—the authors achieved a 5.6‑10.1× speed‑up per epoch for map sizes ranging from 32×32 to 512×512, and increased the performance margin over the CUDA baseline from ~80× to ~385×. The tuned kernel saturated the L2 bandwidth at 77% of peak, indicating that further performance gains are unlikely without new hardware or fundamentally different approaches.

By Andrew James Amos
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Static Pruning Across Sparse Retrieval Regimes: What Transfers, What Breaks, and What Still Helps

arXiv:2608. 16309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Static pruning is widely used to accelerate sparse neural retrieval, yet existing studies each validate their conclusions within a single custom pipeline, leaving it unclear which findings transfer to modern engines with different index organizations and dynamic pruning mechanisms.

By Zirui Song, Yuye Zhu, Yang Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 12

MiniMax Sparse Attention

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 Machine Learning
Sep 3

Unfolding the Leech Lattice: Fused Multi-Shell Decoding and VRAM Layouts for 2-Bit LLM Weights

The paper introduces a multi‑shell decoder for Leech‑lattice vector quantization, achieving the best reported 2‑bit quality under its evaluation protocol. It presents a GPU‑friendly layout that fuses dequantization with matrix‑vector multiplication, demonstrating significant speed and memory advantages over traditional one‑hot masks and other 4‑bit methods. Experiments show the new kernel outperforms baseline approaches across multiple model sizes, with measurable gains in throughput and reduced byte traffic.

By Pier-Jean Malandrino (Scub)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Beyond Static RAG: An Adaptive, Tri-Metric Routing Framework for Efficient Long-Context Inference on Commodity GPUs

The paper introduces the Tri‑Metric Router, a deterministic, training‑free policy that chooses among Raw, Neural, and Lexical pipelines for retrieval‑augmented generation on commodity GPUs. It uses three CPU‑side signals—spatial complexity, syntactic density, and type‑token ratio—to balance VRAM headroom and latency, calibrated on LongBench qasper. The method eliminates out‑of‑memory failures and improves alignment and F1 scores compared to always‑on lexical compression without extra VRAM or training costs.

By Saipraveen Vabbilisetty, Ajay Kumar Boddepalli, Deep Narayan Mishra, Shashank Kapadia, Haoan Wang, Anupriya Sharma
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Cacheable by Design? Training Mixture-of-Experts Routers for Locality Against the Edge Memory-Bandwidth Wall: A Pre-Registered Negative Result with a Systems Measurement Study

The paper investigates whether training Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routers can improve memory‑bandwidth locality on consumer GPUs. Using a new zero‑surgery telemetry tool, the authors measure that a large Qwen3‑235B model is bottlenecked by disk‑based expert access, and that an LRU cache can serve a majority of requests. They pre‑register experiments training 137 M‑parameter MoE models with locality‑aware losses, finding that while cache misses can drop up to 60 % (99 % static‑pin hit rate), every configuration fails to meet a strict 1 % perplexity threshold, indicating a tight coupling between cache efficiency and model quality.

By Shriniwas Ramesh Suram