The paper demonstrates that greedy decoding from large language models is not precision‑invariant: the same model, prompt, and decoding algorithm can produce different outputs when run in BF16 versus FP16 on identical hardware. Across six models (1.1B–7B parameters, four families, and 12B) and three benchmarks, 49–100 % of prompts diverge, with a single token flip often cascading into trajectory‑level divergence. The authors develop an empirical error‑propagation analysis that identifies the top‑two logit margin at the LM head as the key factor, and they propose a low‑overhead intervention—selective FP32 LM head recomputation—that improves exact agreement by 22–36 percentage points with less than 4 % latency overhead.
"whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that precision choices can fundamentally alter model outputs, challenging the assumption of deterministic greedy decoding and highlighting the need for precision‑aware inference strategies."
By Gaoyuan Du, Anam Nawaz Khan, Rex Zhou, Xiaoyang Liu, Deepayan Chakrabarti, Fnu Suya, Xueping Li
arXiv:2609.36329v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) determines not only how many parameters are trained, but also which local directions a model can move in, so sim...
By Wasif Jalal, Sachin Deb, Asif Salekin
arXiv:2610.18227v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Domain-specific curvature is an appealing idea for domain generalization (DG), but curvature learning can denote substantially different computations...
By Sunny Gupta, Amit Sethi
arXiv:2610. 41114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizing a proxy objective can improve human-perceived quality, but the resulting gain can vary with optimization strength.
By Moonwon Choi, Kisung Nam, Seunggeun Lee
arXiv:2607. 21716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Due to the complexity of neural network loss landscapes, optimization theory is forced to rely on idealized models, and there is generally a tradeoff between how theoretically tractable the model is, and how accurately it describes the true optimization dynamics.
By Alexandru Meterez, Pranav Ajit Nair, Depen Morwani, Cengiz Pehlevan, Sham Kakade, Alex Damian
The paper evaluates a narrow implementation of domain‑specific curvature called HyperDG, which rescales Euclidean encoder features during training with learned positive scalars and uses a standard linear classifier at inference. Across six conditions on four benchmark datasets (PACS, VLCS, Office Home, TerraIncognita) and 384 runs, the method’s macro performance is 1.61 percentage points below native DomainBed ERM, with no statistically significant difference after adjustment. The study concludes that this scalar‑scaling approach does not provide evidence of improvement over ERM and offers a bounded negative result for this specific training package.