arXiv Machine Learning

Scaling Zero-Order Pretraining through Model Sharding

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

SCAPE: Accurate and Efficient LLM Training with Extreme Sparse Communication

arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.

By Mingkai Zheng, Junlin Chen, Haotian Xie, Zhao Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Efficient Knowledge Distillation for LLMs: Offline Top-K Logits and a Fused Chunked KL Loss

arXiv:2608. 03796v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models are often the only option for deployment under tight latency, cost, and on-premises constraints, but they are rarely trained from scratch: a compressed model is usually recovered through knowledge distillation (KD).

By Bakbergen Ryskulov, Iker Garc\'ia-Ferrero, David Montero, David Jansen, Ali Hashemi, Jezabel R. Garcia, Antonio Tiene, Rom\'an Or\'us
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
arXiv AI
Jul 22

Federated Lightweight Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 18343v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning is bottlenecked by communication: FedAvg and pseudo-gradient schemes transmit a payload that scales with the model, and gradient compression shrinks it by only a constant factor.

By Radhakrishna Achanta, Will Reed