Inference efficiency

Quantization, distillation, pruning and serving work aimed at the same accuracy for less memory, latency and money.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Scorpio: Serving Right Requests at the Right Time for Heterogeneous SLOs in LLM Inference

Scorpio is an LLM serving system that optimizes for heterogeneous Service Level Objectives (SLOs) such as Time to First Token (TTFT) and Time Per Output Token (TPOT). It uses adaptive scheduling across admission control, queue management, and batch selection, featuring a TTFT Guard that reorders requests by least-deadline-first and rejects unattainable ones, and a TPOT Guard that employs VBS-based admission control and a credit-based batching mechanism. Predictive modules support both guards, and evaluations show Scorpio can increase system goodput by up to 14.4× and improve SLO adherence by up to 46.5% under high load compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

By Yinghao Tang, Tingfeng Lan, Bo Pan, Xiuqi Huang, Hui Lu, Wei Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Deep greedy unfolding: Sorting out argsorting in greedy sparse recovery algorithms

The paper introduces Soft-OMP and Soft-IHT, permutation‑based variants of Orthogonal Matching Pursuit and Iterative Hard Thresholding that replace the non‑differentiable argsort with continuous soft‑sort operators. These differentiable algorithms enable the construction of fully trainable neural network architectures—OMP‑Net and IHT‑Net—while preserving the core greedy sparse recovery logic. The authors show both theoretically and numerically that the soft variants approximate their hard counterparts with controllable accuracy and can be extended to structured sparse recovery by learning structure‑aware weights.

By Sina Mohammad-Taheri, Matthew J. Colbrook, Simone Brugiapaglia
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation

The paper introduces Gated Recurrent Transformers, a depth‑sharing architecture that brackets a single shared core with fixed prelude and coda blocks and uses a lightweight projection and element‑wise update gate to modulate recurrent updates. This design allows functional specialization across recurrences while reducing memory footprint. Experiments show that, under equal FLOPs or parameter budgets, the recurrent model matches or surpasses deeper GPT‑2 Small baselines, achieving similar or better accuracy with fewer parameters and lower peak decoding memory.

By Amr Hegazy, Amr Alanwar, Mostafa Elhoushi
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Efficient Training with Foresight: Multi-Token Auxiliary Supervision for Autoregressive Image Generation

The paper introduces MTAR, a training framework for autoregressive image generation that enhances performance through multi-token prediction, token-level contrastive regularization, and semantic dropping. These components address sparse supervision, improve representation discriminability, and accelerate training without affecting inference. On ImageNet, MTAR outperforms LlamaGen with lower FID and faster training, achieving comparable results in only a third of the iterations.

By Guo Niu, Xiongfei Yao, Teng Wang, Nannan Zhu
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Training-Free Interaction-Aligned Visual Token Pruning for Efficient Embodied Manipulation

The paper introduces Interaction‑Aligned Pruning (IAprune), a training‑free method for visual token pruning in embodied manipulation tasks. IAprune jointly decides per‑frame budget and token selection, using semantic‑motion spatial agreement to choose between conservative and aggressive coverage, and applies geometric residual correction to focus on under‑represented boundaries. Experiments on four policies, three simulation benchmarks, and a real‑robot platform show that IAprune matches unpruned performance on LIBERO while achieving up to 1.54× speed‑up and 1.48× acceleration on a real robot.

By Jintao Cheng, Weibin Li, Haozhe Wang, Gang Wang, Yipu Zhang, Xiaoyu Tang, Jin Wu, Xieyuanli Chen, Yunhui Liu, Wei Zhang
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

Where to Look Matters: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Long-Video Understanding

The paper introduces Clue-OPSD, a clue‑privileged on‑policy self‑distillation framework that improves long‑video understanding by focusing on short, question‑relevant clue intervals rather than the entire video. Experiments on multiple benchmarks and Qwen3.5 model scales show that this approach consistently outperforms standard backbone models and competes strongly with supervised post‑training baselines, all while requiring fewer input frames and no additional inference modules.

By Kaishen Wang, Dongdi Zhao, Yijun Liang, Dingqiang Ye, Ruibo Chen, Heng Huang, Di Fu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

CropCop: An Auditable 120-Class Plant-Health Model from Benchmark Reconstruction to a Quantised Runtime Artifact

CropCop is a closed‑set plant‑health recognition system covering 120 operational classes, built from a rigorously audited dataset of 109,107 images after removing 3,233 duplicate relationships. The model, based on a fine‑tuned DINOv3 ConvNeXt‑Tiny, achieves 98.51% accuracy and 96.87% macro‑F1 on a locked internal test, while a quantised MobileNetV4 variant reaches 98.46% accuracy and 96.23% macro‑F1 in a 22.60 MiB runtime artifact. Validation‑only post‑training quantisation and a compact ExecuTorch/XNNPACK PTE ensure high fidelity between the trained model and its deployed form, with minimal decision changes between the INT8 graph and the final artifact.

By Rana Muhammad Ahmed, Sabahat Abbas
Simon Willison
Aug 26

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next

Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is an open‑weights multimodal Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) model previewing the architecture of Qwen4. It contains 125 B tokens with only 6 B active, giving a performance boost. The author has tested it on a DGX Spark with Unsloth quantized models, exploring variants like UD‑IQ1_S and UD‑Q2_K_XL, and highlighted a high‑reasoning‑effort example from UD‑Q2_K_XL.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

On-Policy Self-Distillation in Diffusion Models

The paper introduces DiffusionOPSD, an on‑policy self‑distillation framework that transforms image‑level reinforcement learning rewards into explicit targets for intermediate denoising predictions in diffusion models. By generating trajectories with a frozen behavior policy and constructing bounded positive and negative targets around query states, the method trains a policy to fit these targets before updating the behavior policy via an exponential moving average. Experiments on SD 3.5‑M and Z‑Image‑Turbo show that DiffusionOPSD achieves the best held‑out scores in 19 of 20 reward‑matched settings, outperforms the strongest competitor by up to 44 % and cuts GPU‑hour usage by 40–63 % compared to DiffusionNFT.

By Wei Zhou, Xiongwei Zhu, Lingdong Kong, Bo Chen, Lei Zhang, Yongyuan Liang, Xiaoxia Hou, Ye Tian, Xian Sun, Yingshuo Wang, Linfeng Li, Shengqiong Wu, Leigang Qu, Feng Li, Wei Liu, Julian McAuley, Tat-Seng Chua