Related papers: TEON: Tensorized Orthonormalization Beyond Layer-W…

DiLoCo is a powerful framework for training large language models (LLMs), enabling larger optimal batch sizes and increased accelerator utilization under networking constraints. However, DiLoCo's performance has been shown to degrade as the…

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become increasingly popular and important in fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), especially on edge devices due to its ability to adjust the model to local data without the need for memory-intensive…

Recent advances in spectral optimization, notably Muon, have demonstrated that constraining update steps to the Stiefel manifold can significantly accelerate training and improve generalization. However, Muon implicitly assumes an isotropic…

Recent efforts to accelerate LLM pretraining have focused on computationally-efficient approximations that exploit second-order structure. This raises a key question for large-scale training: how much performance is forfeited by these…

A big convergence of model architectures across language, vision, speech, and multimodal is emerging. However, under the same name "Transformers", the above areas use different implementations for better performance, e.g., Post-LayerNorm…

Geometric machine learning models such as graph neural networks have achieved remarkable success in recent years in chemical and materials science research for applications such as high-throughput virtual screening and atomistic…

The muon optimizer has picked up much attention as of late as a possible replacement to the seemingly omnipresent Adam optimizer. Recently, care has been taken to document the scaling laws of hyper-parameters under muon such as weight decay…

Most first-order optimizers treat matrix-valued parameters as vectors, ignoring the intrinsic geometry of hidden-layer weights in neural networks. Muon addresses this mismatch by updating along the polar factor of a momentum matrix, but its…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in vision understanding and reasoning. However, the autoregressive Transformer architecture used by MLLMs requries tokenization on input images, which limits their…

Speculative decoding (SD) has become a standard technique for accelerating LLM inference without sacrificing output quality. Recent advances in speculative decoding have shifted from sequential chain-based drafting to tree-structured…

In learning with recurrent or very deep feed-forward networks, employing unitary matrices in each layer can be very effective at maintaining long-range stability. However, restricting network parameters to be unitary typically comes at the…

The rapid expansion of modern wide-area networks (WANs) has made traffic engineering (TE) increasingly challenging, as traditional solvers struggle to keep pace. Although existing offline ML-driven approaches accelerate TE optimization with…

Successful methods for unsupervised neural machine translation (UNMT) employ crosslingual pretraining via self-supervision, often in the form of a masked language modeling or a sequence generation task, which requires the model to align the…

The success of visual instruction tuning has accelerated the development of large language and vision models (LLVMs). Following the scaling laws of instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), LLVMs either have further increased their…

In this note, we inspect the convergence of a new optimizer for pretraining LLMs, namely the Muon optimizer. Such an optimizer is closely related to a specialized steepest descent method where the update direction is the minimizer of the…

Document-level machine translation manages to outperform sentence level models by a small margin, but have failed to be widely adopted. We argue that previous research did not make a clear use of the global context, and propose a new…

Fine-tuned transformer models have shown superior performances in many natural language tasks. However, the large model size prohibits deploying high-performance transformer models on resource-constrained devices. This paper proposes a…

Scaling large multimodal models (LMMs) to 3D understanding poses unique challenges: point cloud data is sparse and irregular, existing models rely on fragmented architectures with modality-specific encoders, and training pipelines often…

Adaptive optimizers such as Adam have achieved great success in training large-scale models like large language models and diffusion models. However, they often generalize worse than non-adaptive methods, such as SGD on classical…

The installation of the muon telescope detector opened new possibilities for studying dimuon production at STAR. However, backgrounds from hadron punch-through and weak decays of pions and kaons make the identification of primary muons…