arXiv:2609.37899v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Zero-order optimization (ZO) trains without backpropagation, making it relevant to forward-only hardware and non-differentiable loss, but its gradient...
By Francois Chaubard, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Chris R\'e
arXiv:2606. 01717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction tuning aligns large language models, including multimodal ones, with diverse user intents, but scaling to heterogeneous mixtures is hindered by gradient interference and bandwidth-heavy synchronization.
By Minsik Choi, Geewook Kim
arXiv:2607. 13380v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive Coding (PC) offers a biologically motivated alternative to backpropagation via local weight updates, yet routing error between layers still relies on an autograd Jacobian-transpose ($J^\top$) product - the last non-local operation in PC.
By Junlong Shen, Xingyu Li
The paper reports a large‑scale post‑training ternarisation of the Qwen3 language model, extending a conversion pipeline from the 4B to the 8B variant. Using KOTMS rotation, E2M‑ATQ adaptive ternarisation, and GPTQ‑style error compensation, the authors achieve a 1.361× perplexity ratio across three corpora and retain 78.5% of the FP16 accuracy on zero‑shot tasks, with the 8B model outperforming the 4B by 8.9 percentage points. The study also demonstrates lossless lattice‑aware packing, producing an 8.24 GiB checkpoint that preserves perplexity, and shows that direct packed execution can reach 15.52 tokens/s in 7.35 GiB, though packed GEMV remains slower than FP16 cuBLAS.
By Anirudh Malik, M Sparsh Mehra, Poojith Devan
arXiv:2607. 01678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication increasingly dominates the cost of Large Language Model (LLM) pre-training, especially under data-parallel and sharded training schemes, where gradient synchronization and parameter reconstruction overhead increase with model size and system scale.
By Mingkai Zheng, Junlin Chen, Haotian Xie, Zhao Zhang
arXiv:2608. 09250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) must serve devices with varying computational capabilities.
By Bostan Khan, Masoud Daneshtalab