Inference efficiency

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

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arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 10

RoLA: Rotary-Positioned Low-Rank Linear Attention for Efficient Diffusion Transformers

arXiv:2609.06712v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) achieve strong video generation quality, but their dense spatiotemporal self-attention scales quadratically with sequ...

By Zekun Zhang, Yixiang Cai, Yuxi Liu, Tengxu Sun, Tianle Liu, Zhoutong Wu, Haoyu Li, Baole Ai, Ang Wang, Jiamang Wang, Lin Qu, Kun Yuan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Miles v0.1: Production-Level Post-Training

arXiv:2609.08368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Miles v0.1, a full-stack, production-ready system for frontier post-training. Building upon the clean design of slime, Miles designs each st...

By RadixArk, :, Tom Chen, Mao Cheng, Shi Dong, Kangrui Du, Yanbin Jiang, Jiajun Li, Yiming Li, Tao Lin, Yusheng Su, Andy Ye, Yueming Yuan, Zhichen Zeng
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Damage-Aware Bandit Pruning for Vision and Language Transformers

The paper introduces a structured post‑training pruning method for vision and language transformers called Damage‑Aware Bandit Pruning. It treats the selection of functional units (attention heads and MLP channel groups) as a multi‑armed bandit problem, using paired damage (masked loss minus base loss) as a reward to guide either UCB or Thompson Sampling policies. Experiments on a range of models (GPT‑2, OPT, Pythia, Qwen2.5, SmolLM2, ViT‑B/16, DeiT‑Tiny, Swin‑Tiny) show that the bandit approaches generally reduce degradation compared to budgeted‑greedy baselines, with statistically significant improvements in most comparisons.

By Salem Ameen, Sunil Vadera
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Exploring Bottom-Up Clustering for Creating Semantic IDs

The paper proposes a new algorithm for generating Semantic IDs that are both unique and preserve the structure of the original embedding space. By employing bottom‑up clustering, the method maintains local structure, leading to higher clustering quality. This improved structure enhances the utility of the Semantic IDs for downstream generative retrieval tasks.

By Leah Woldemariam, Sudhanshu Garg, Taha Belkhouja, Charles Kim-Yip, Ali Sahami
arXiv AI
Sep 10

ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoning

ASDA (Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation) is a framework that improves large language models on financial reasoning tasks without fine‑tuning. It works by having a teacher model analyze a student’s failures, cluster errors, and generate structured skill artifacts—reasoning procedures, code templates, and worked examples—that are injected during inference. On the FAMMA benchmark, ASDA boosts arithmetic reasoning by up to 17.33% and non‑arithmetic reasoning by 5.95%, outperforming existing training‑free methods.

By Tik Yu Yim, Wenting Tan, Sum Yee Chan, Tak-Wah Lam, Siu Ming Yiu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

KBBQ: A Predictive Noise Law and the Limits of Spectrum Flattening in FP4 Quantization

The paper presents a second‑order theory of quantization noise for matrix multiplication, characterizing quantization formats by the variance they assign to each element. It derives a closed‑form signal‑to‑noise‑ratio law for floating‑point rounding, introduces an upper bound κ* that cannot be exceeded by any function‑preserving linear transform, and proposes KBBQ—a method that parameterizes how closely a transform approaches this bound. Experiments on W4A4 across four base models and two FP4 formats show that KBBQ outperforms the previous state of the art without extra deployment‑time computation.

By Lexington Whalen, Yuki Ito, Ryo Sakamoto
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Demystifying Entropy-based Selection for Chain-of-Thought Compression in Large Reasoning Models

The paper evaluates entropy-based pruning for compressing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in large models. Across multiple models and tasks, low- and high-entropy step selection shows no advantage over random pruning, and low-entropy token retention only helps on mathematical benchmarks due to the low entropy of numeric tokens. Patching a few CoT tokens with their original activations restores near-perfect performance, indicating that task information is distributed throughout the entire reasoning chain rather than concentrated in a small set of tokens.

By Sara Candussio, Daniel Scalena, Luca Bortolussi, Elisabetta Fersini, Malvina Nissim, Gabriele Sarti
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Evaluating the Scalability and Adversarial Generalization of GRPO-Trained NLI Models

The paper evaluates the scalability and adversarial generalization of Natural Language Inference (NLI) models trained with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for Chain-of-Thought learning. By fine‑tuning 7B, 14B, and 32B language models with LoRA and QLoRA, the authors show strong performance on standard and adversarial NLI benchmarks, with the 32B model outperforming supervised baselines on adversarial sets. Using AWQ quantization, the 32B model fits within 22 GB of CUDA memory, demonstrating a scalable, practical framework for robust NLI without sacrificing inference quality.

By Pablo Miralles-Gonz\'alez, Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Mart\'in, David Camacho
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Multi-label versus multi-class classification of blood cells and their aggregates in microfluidic channels

arXiv:2609.07410v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deformability cytometry (DC) is a type of imaging flow cytometry, which uses a camera-equipped device to measure cellular stiffness in addition to ot...

By Igor Zingman, Shada Abuhattum, Sara Kaliman, Maximilian Schl\"ogel, Paul M\"uller, Mark\'eta Kub\'ankov\'a, Nadine Str\"ohlein, Manuela Hauke, Lena Schn\"orer, Martin Kr\"ater, Jochen Guck
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

MILAAP: Mobile Link Allocation via Attention-based Prediction

The paper introduces MiLAAP, an attention‑based framework that predicts channel occupancy and node motion in channel‑hopping communication systems without exchanging state information. By leveraging self‑attention and multi‑head attention, each node passively observes local channel activity to forecast interference patterns and mobility, achieving near‑perfect prediction accuracy across varied mobility scenarios and demonstrating zero‑shot generalizability to new channel‑sequence periods.

By Yung-Fu Chen, Anish Arora
arXiv AI
Sep 10

A*-Thought-V2: Efficient Latent Reasoning via Geometric Dynamics of LLM

A*-Thought-V2 is a framework that models Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a geometric trajectory in a 3D PCA space, using explicit-implicit latent tokens to compress steps that deviate from the main question-to-solution direction. The method measures alignment angles to decide which steps remain text and which become latent, and introduces stepwise embedding forcing and label forcing to train the architecture. Experiments on Qwen models show up to 2.6% accuracy gains, halved response length, and significant reductions in computation and training time.

By Xiaoang Xu, Siyuan Liu, Shuo Wang, Junlan Feng, Fanyu Meng, Zhu Zhang, Jixun Wang, Xiaorong Wang, Zihan Zhou, Xin Li, Chaojun Xiao, Yiming Zhang, Huijia Wu, Liuyu Xiang, Peipei Li, Zhaofeng He