arXiv AI By Sheng Ren, Yadong Wang, Naiqiang Tan, Jiangang Kong, Jun Fang, Rui Liu, Jun Wang, Kai Chen, Lipeng Liang, Xiang Chen

Rethinking Normalization Placement for LLMs: Post-Norm under Curriculum Depth Growing

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2608. 13156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-norm is the standard normalization placement in modern Transformers because it facilitates joint optimization of full-depth models.

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 AI.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

DASH: Dual-Branch Score Distillation for Guidance-Calibrated Compact Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606. 00798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter compression of class-conditional diffusion models reveals an underexplored limitation in output-level distillation: the unconditional score branch remains unsupervised, leaving the classifier-free guidance gap underdetermined in the student.

By Abdullah Al Shafi, Kazi Saeed Alam, Sk Imran Hossain, Engelbert Mephu Nguifo
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

From Gradients to Capabilities: Understanding Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation

The paper investigates how teacher signals influence parameter updates in Multi‑Teacher On‑Policy Distillation (MOPD) by analyzing Qwen3‑1.7B and SmolLM3‑3B. It shows that loss averaging, Adam’s first‑moment bias, BF16 rounding, and the choice of averaging rule all shape the gradients and ultimately affect task performance. The study quantifies these effects, revealing, for example, that token‑averaging favors longer responses and that BF16 rounding masks most weight changes.

By Siqi Zhu, Suozhi Huang, Kaixuan Zhang, Yuheng Yang, Zhanyang Jin, Yihang Sun, Jiaxuan You