16 papers
The Usefulness Gap in Proof-of-Useful-Work: An Empirical Study of Pearl's cuPOW Protocol
Abhinaba Basu
Pearl, a Layer-1 blockchain with high-profile AI industry endorsements, markets its Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) protocol as simultaneously securing the network and performing AI in…
Structural Sensitivity in Compressed Transformers: Relative Error Propagation and Layer Removal
Abhinaba Basu, Kumkum Basu, Koushik Deb
Compressing transformer weights makes large language models cheaper to deploy. But each layer's compression introduces an error. These errors accumulate as the signal passes throug…
HubRouter: A Pluggable Sub-Quadratic Routing Primitive for Hybrid Sequence Models
Abhinaba Basu
We introduce HubRouter, a pluggable module that replaces O(n^2) attention layers with O(nM) hub-mediated routing, where M << n is a small number of learned hub tokens. We demonstra…
When Does Content-Based Routing Work? Representation Requirements for Selective Attention in Hybrid Sequence Models
Abhinaba Basu
We identify a routing paradox in hybrid sequence models: content-based routing - deciding which tokens deserve expensive attention - requires pairwise computation, and this require…
Transactional Attention: Semantic Sponsorship for KV-Cache Retention
Abhinaba Basu
At K=16 tokens (0.4% of a 4K context), every existing KV-cache compression method achieves 0% on credential retrieval. The failure mode is dormant tokens: credentials, API keys, an…
Measuring and curing reasoning rigidity: from decorative chain-of-thought to genuine faithfulness
Abhinaba Basu, Pavan Chakraborty
Language models increasingly show their work by writing step-by-step reasoning before answering. But are these steps genuinely used, or is the answer rigid - fixed before reasoning…