arXiv:2608.21098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fusing prior knowledge with data-driven learning is attractive where data is scarce, yet no controlled account says when it helps, is redundant, or har...
GEAR is a two‑stage framework that distills tabular foundation models into lightweight MLP or tree‑based predictors for efficient CPU deployment. In the first stage, synthetic covariates are used as teacher‑query locations to train the student on soft TFM targets, expanding coverage beyond observed rows. The second stage re‑anchors the student to the target distribution using real labels and out‑of‑fold teacher predictions, preventing self‑labeling leakage and improving performance. Experiments on TALENT and TabArena show that GEAR‑distilled MLPs outperform supervised MLPs by up to 2.00 AUC points on binary tasks and 1.35 on multiclass tasks, and also outperform CatBoost, while dramatically reducing inference time and memory usage.
arXiv:2606. 03938v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-epoch training is becoming the standard now that compute is growing faster than the supply of high-quality text.
UpgradeBench is a decision‑centric longitudinal benchmark that evaluates how fine‑tuned language‑model specialists should be handled when new base‑model releases occur. It covers four consecutive Qwen releases, a continuation checkpoint, six tasks, two model sizes, and OLMo checkpoints with known training lineage, and examines whether retraining, adapter transfer, or other recovery strategies improve specialist performance. The benchmark reveals that upgrade gains vary by task and release interval, that direct adapter copying is sensitive to pretraining distance, and that teacher relabeling can recover specialists without new annotations. "whyItMatters":"The study provides actionable insights into the cost‑effective management of specialist models across model releases, showing how to balance retraining effort with performance gains."
arXiv:2606. 05378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We test whether a single screen-and-ablate recipe -- identify attention-head circuits by task-pattern selectivity, then verify by causal ablation against a matched-random null -- produces consistent mechanistic claims across model families.
arXiv:2606. 29280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We identify intervention bias as a previously unquantified failure mode of zero-shot large-language-model (LLM) educational advisory agents: without task-specific training, they recommend action when a hindsight-optimal oracle policy mandates inaction.
arXiv:2606. 16364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents mis-call tools, and the natural guess is that the model failed to see the right tool in a crowded harness.
The paper investigates how new concepts can be integrated into unified multimodal models (UMMs) by separating generation and understanding objectives through a novel visual entity bound to a single task direction. Experiments show that the effectiveness of cross‑task usability depends on where the concept is injected into the shared computation, with a mid‑stack alignment objective achieving high concept acquisition with minimal loss to overall performance. The study highlights that unified weights alone are insufficient; the two directions must share a semantic format at the entry point for efficient concept integration.
arXiv:2606. 25432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference efficiency is typically pursued by shrinking the model: distillation, pruning, quantization, and sparse routing each lower per-token cost while treating token count as fixed.
arXiv:2608. 20061v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures significantly expand model capacity without a proportional increase in computational cost.
Neural solvers are built to deduce, branch, and revise intermediate states. The Lattice Deduction Transformer (LDT) appears to do exactly that.
arXiv:2608. 07911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have outgrown accelerator memory, and offloading expert weights to host memory is now standard.