arXiv AI

Bounded Hyperbolic Tangent: A Stable and Efficient Alternative to Pre-Layer Normalization in Large Language Models

arXiv:2601. 09719v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pre-Layer Normalization (Pre-LN) is the de facto choice for large language models (LLMs) and is crucial for stable pretraining and effective transfer learning.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Generating Pretraining Tokens from Organic Data for Data-Bound Scaling

The paper introduces SynPro, a synthetic data generation framework that augments limited organic text for large language model pretraining by applying rephrasing and reformatting operations. SynPro’s generators are optimized with reinforcement learning rewards for quality, faithfulness, and data influence, and are updated continuously as training plateaus. Experiments on 400M, 1.1B, and 2B models show that SynPro can unlock 3.4–5.2× the effective tokens of standard repetition, even outperforming a non‑data‑bound oracle at larger scales.

By Zichun Yu, Chenyan Xiong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 15

Inference-Time Machine Unlearning via Gated Activation Redirection

arXiv:2605. 12765v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models memorize vast amounts of training data, raising concerns regarding privacy, copyright infringement, and safety.

By Vin\'icius Conte Turani, Ot\'avio Parraga, Jo\~ao Vitor Boer Abitante, Kristen K. Arguello, Joana Pasquali, Ramiro N. Barros, Flavio du Pin Calmon, Christian Mattjie, Rodrigo C. Barros, Lucas S. Kupssinsk\"u
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 4

Breaking the Scale Barrier: One-Shot Knowledge Transfer via Frequency Transform

arXiv:2603. 07523v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transferring knowledge by fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained networks has become a standard paradigm for downstream tasks, yet the knowledge of a pre-trained model is tightly coupled with monolithic architecture, which restricts flexible reuse across models of varying scales.

By Jianlu Shen, Fu Feng, Yucheng Xie, Jiaqi Lv, Xin Geng
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Closing the Loop: Practical Training Recipes for Looped Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Jul 14

Memory Savings at What Cost? A Study of Alternatives to Backpropagation

arXiv:2506. 21833v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Forward-mode automatic differentiation (FmAD) and zero-order (ZO) optimization are increasingly proposed as memory-efficient, backpropagation-free alternatives for large language model (LLM) fine-tuning, yet their benefits are typically evaluated only against standard backpropagation (BP), omitting memory-efficient variants such as activation checkpointing.

By Kunjal Panchal, Sunav Choudhary, Yuriy Brun, Hui Guan