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arXiv Computation and Language By Gautam Veldanda

Baseline Shape Decides the Verdict: A Controlled Re-Examination of Ternary Language Models at 60K Parameters

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The study re‑examines a reported advantage of a routed ternary (1.58‑bit) language model over a full‑precision transformer at 60K parameters. By running controlled experiments with multiple seeds and a fixed training recipe, the authors find that the apparent benefit largely stems from the choice of baseline model shape rather than the ternary architecture itself. While the routed model does outperform other shapes at a larger 130M‑byte budget, its advantage diminishes when a plain gated diagonal‑SSM block is used, and the ternary penalty varies with architecture and quantization details.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Computation and Language.

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