40 papers
ISO: An RLVR-Native Optimization Stack
Hanqing Zhu, Wenyan Cong, Zhizhou Sha +8
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is rapidly advancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, yet the optimization layer that converts reward feedback i…
When Does Sparsity Mitigate the Curse of Depth in LLMs
Dilxat Muhtar, Xinyuan Song, Sebastian Pokutta +4
Recent work has demonstrated the curse of depth in large language models (LLMs), where later layers contribute less to learning and representation than earlier layers. Such under-u…
AlphaQ: Calibration-Free Bit Allocation for Mixture-of-Experts Quantization
Wanqi Yang, Yuexiao Ma, Alexander Conzelmann +4
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures scale model capacity through sparse expert activation, but their deployment remains memory-bound because all expert weights must reside in me…
Leave it to the Specialist: Repair Sparse LLMs with Sparse Fine-Tuning via Sparsity Evolution
Qiao Xiao, Alan Ansell, Boqian Wu +4
Sparse large language models (LLMs) offer an attractive direction toward efficient deployment, but adapting them to downstream tasks remains challenging. The central difficulty is…
One LR Doesn't Fit All: Heavy-Tail Guided Layerwise Learning Rates for LLMs
Di He, Songjun Tu, Keyu Wang +2
Learning rate configuration is a fundamental aspect of modern deep learning. The prevailing practice of applying a uniform learning rate across all layers overlooks the structural…
GradientStabilizer:Fix the Norm, Not the Gradient
Tianjin Huang, Zhangyang Wang, Haotian Hu +10
Training instability in modern deep learning systems is frequently triggered by rare but extreme gradient-norm spikes, which can induce oversized parameter updates, corrupt optimiz…