arXiv:2607. 20548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Higher-order optimizers such as Muon and SOAP offer faster convergence than AdamW, but their computational cost and numerical stability challenges have limited adoption at scale.
By Mikail Khona, Aditya Vavre, Boxiang Wang, Deyu Fu, Hao Wu, Mike Chrzanowski, Bryan Catanzaro, Dheevatsa Mudigere, Jeff Pool, Michael Lightstone, Mohammad Shoeybi, Mostofa Patwary, Nima Tajbakhsh, Tijmen Blankevoort
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:2601. 21461v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern sparse language models typically achieve sparsity through Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers, which dynamically route tokens to dense MLP "experts.
By Albert Tseng, Christopher De Sa
arXiv:2606. 00888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) offers a promising paradigm for improving the training and inference efficiency of deep neural networks; however, we find that in large language model training, DST can suffer from optimization instability, manifested as loss spikes after topology updates.
By Qiao Xiao, Boqian Wu, Patrik Okanovic, Tomasz Sternal, Maurice van Keulen, Elena Mocanu, Mykola Pechenizkiy, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Torsten Hoefler
arXiv:2510. 20535v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation or chain-of-thought reasoning have led to longer contexts and increased inference costs.
By Hippolyte Pilchen, Edouard Grave, Patrick P\'erez
arXiv:2607. 22577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven their success, yet dense Transformers couple capacity and computation: every parameter is activated for every token, making training and inference costs grow linearly with model size-a critical bottleneck as models approach trillion-parameter regimes.
By Xin Yang, Yemin Wang, Mingda Liu, Letian Li, Shuaishuai Cao, Zhengxiao He, Ryan Dong
arXiv:2609.15131v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) require substantial computation to process numerous visual tokens across all transformer layers. Most method...
By Yuyao Sun, Tao Deng, Shuang Li, Deqing Wang
MONA is a new optimizer that extends the Muon optimizer by adding a Nesterov‑style acceleration term derived from an exponential moving average of gradient differences. The paper provides a convergence analysis showing that this term offers curvature‑aware corrections while maintaining Muon’s spectral‑norm regularization. Empirical results demonstrate that MONA outperforms both Muon and AdamW on Mixture‑of‑Experts pretraining across models ranging from 1 B to 68 B parameters, and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on downstream benchmarks after fine‑tuning the largest model.
By Jiacheng Li, Jianchao Tan, Hongtao Xu, Jiaqi Zhang, Yifan Lu, Yerui Sun, Yuchen Xie, Xunliang Cai
arXiv:2607. 00510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowing which training examples drive outputs is fundamental to auditing, correcting, and understanding language models, yet for modern LLMs this remains expensive, approximate, and largely post-hoc.
By Dan Ley, Giang Nguyen, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Julius Adebayo
arXiv:2609.35232v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Visual-token compression is effective for improving the efficiency of vision-language models, but under extreme compression budgets, token pr...
By Rui Zhong, Yu Li, Zheyu Yan, Cheng Zhuo
The paper introduces Mixture of Activations (MoA), a token‑adaptive feedforward network design that mixes multiple activation functions using lightweight gates while sharing linear projections. It also presents learnable activations (LA) as an input‑independent variant. The authors theoretically prove that MoA strictly surpasses both fixed‑activation FFNs and LA in expressive power, and empirically demonstrate that MoA achieves lower loss and better scaling on dense and MoE language models from 0.12 B to 2 B parameters with minimal overhead.
By Mingze Wang, Jinbo Wang, Yikuan Xia, Kai Shen, Shu Zhong
arXiv:2606. 27153v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Matrix-orthogonalization-based optimizers, exemplified by Muon, have demonstrated strong convergence behavior across a wide range of modern deep learning workloads.
By Vincent Chen, Starrick Liu, Regis Cheng, Dance Yang, Shalfun Li, Ryan Yu, Lucy Liang, Hang Su, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang