arXiv AI

Curvature Cryptanalysis of Smooth Transformer Feed-Forward Networks

arXiv AI
Jun 26

SharQ: Bridging Activation Sparsity and FP4 Quantization for LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 26587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-bit floating-point formats and semi-structured sparsity are increasingly supported by modern accelerators, yet combining them for LLM activation compression remains challenging: activations contain input-dependent outliers that dominate block scales in FP4 quantization, and directly applying N:M sparsity masks discards moderate values, coupling sparsification loss with quantization error.

By Haoqian Meng, Yilun Luo, Yafei Zhao, Wenyuan Liu, Huaqing Zheng, Xindian Ma, Peng Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Robust CurveMoE: Multi-Norm Adversarial Defense for Mixture-of-Experts Models via Mode Connectivity

Robust CurveMoE is a mixture‑of‑experts framework that protects neural networks against perturbations defined by multiple norm constraints. It connects norm‑specialized models through a low‑loss path, selectively expertises only influential layers, and shares the rest of the parameters across routing paths. The method introduces contribution‑guided partial updating to reduce curve‑construction cost and provides a theoretical bound on the objective gap between partial and full optimization, achieving consistent improvements in clean, norm‑specific, and Union accuracy on CIFAR‑100 and ImageNet‑100.

By Xu Zhang, Ren Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Dense Structural Compression of Transformers via Gauge-Correct Channel Removal

The paper introduces GaugeLasso, a method that applies symmetric group‑lasso penalties to transformer channels during training, enabling entire tensor slices to be zeroed out while maintaining dense tensors for GPU efficiency. By calibrating channel penalties based on inference utility per compute, the network self‑organizes into depth‑dependent structural profiles that can be dramatically smaller than the original architecture, achieving up to 255‑fold compression on a polynomial division task and outperforming hand‑designed baselines on language modeling and autoencoding benchmarks. The approach also accelerates training and reveals over‑provisioned axes that guide subsequent design iterations.

By Jed A. Duersch, Na\"im Es-Sebbani, Nathana\"el Haas, Zied Bouraoui
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