4 papers
Solver-Hard Is Not Model-Hard: A Hardness-Controlled Diagnostic for LLM Constraint Reasoning
Lucky Verma
LLM constraint reasoners are often evaluated near the random-SAT phase transition, confounding density and solver hardness. We test instance-level transfer while near-matching clau…
When Top-1 Fails: Calibrating LoRA Monitors for Masked Diffusion LMs
Lucky Verma, Pratik Yadav
Discrete diffusion language model (DLM) fine-tuning inherits inexpensive diagnostics from denoising-time confidence monitors, but their PEFT-training meaning is untested. We test t…
Weight Decay Regimes in Grokking Transformers: Cheap Online Diagnostics
Lucky Verma
Transformers trained on modular arithmetic exhibit sharp transitions between memorization, generalization, and collapse. We show that weight decay acts as a scalar empirical contro…
When Does Removing LayerNorm Help? Activation Bounding as a Regime-Dependent Implicit Regularizer
Lucky Verma
Dynamic Tanh (DyT) removes LayerNorm by bounding activations with a learned tanh(alpha x). We show that this bounding is a regime-dependent implicit regularizer, not a uniformly be…