arXiv AI

Token Geometry

arXiv:2607. 01455v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models learn continuous programs over discrete symbols, with the embedding table and LM-head acting as the read/write interface between them.

arXiv AI
Jul 24

SOAP, Muon, and Beyond: Pushing LLM Pretraining Scales

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 AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

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 AI
Jun 4

L$^3$: Large Lookup Layers

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 AI
Jun 2

Memory-Efficient LLM Training with Dynamic Sparsity: From Stability to Practical Scaling

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 AI
Jul 28

cMoLLM at Scale: Horizontal Scaling Laws for Mixture-of-LLMs

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 Machine Learning
Sep 23

MONA: Muon Optimizer with Nesterov Acceleration for Scalable Language Model Training

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 Machine Learning
Jul 2

Prototype Language Models

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 Machine Learning
Aug 31

More Expressive Feedforward Layers: Part I. Token-Adaptive Mixing of Activations

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