Low-Bit GDN Recurrent-State Quantization: Global Gradient-aware Allocation and Pure-Write Sliding Windows
14d
- Publicado
- Recolectado
Linear attention stores historical information in a recurrent state of fixed size, providing a compact memory representation for long-context inference. Reducing state precision further lowers per-request storage requirements, but quantized writeback errors enter subsequent recurrences, degrade prediction quality on long-reasoning tasks, and can be accompanied by repetitive generation and excessively long outputs. We propose Global Gradient-aware Allocation (GGA) and the Pure-Write Sliding Window (PW) to address precision allocation and recent-information maintenance. GGA combines candidate quantization residuals with gradient sensitivity to future prediction loss to allocate head bit widths under a model-wide mixed-precision budget. PW independently maintains recent pure writes as FP8 vector pairs, propagates them through the full GDN state transition, and merges them into the low-bit historical state only after they leave the window. Across seven evaluations on Qwen3.5-4B/9B, GGA allocation alone improves over STEPQuant@4 by 19.48/29.84 percentage points. Adding PW-S8 yields seven-task macro-averages of 69.83%/78.63%, improving over STEPQuant@4 by 38.39/41.21 percentage points, respectively. Both precision reallocation and window maintenance improve task scores while mitigating excessively long outputs: at @6, GGA reduces mean generation length, averaged equally across tasks, by 10.45%/14.65% relative to STEPQuant; adding PW-S8 to GGA@4 further reduces mean generation length by 32.32%/36.77%. Comparisons at similar storage budgets further show that using additional capacity to maintain recent writes yields higher task scores and shorter mean outputs than solely increasing the bit width of the accumulated state.
Autores
Qinghang Huang, Xuchu Huang, Xunzhao Yin
Categorías
overfeed.news indexa y enlaza. Publicamos un extracto breve; el artículo completo sigue en arXiv AI Papers.
Más de arXiv AI Papers
Inicia sesión para seguir esta fuente
Unbundling Multimodal Vision Encoding
How multimodal language models should encode visual input remains up for debate. Most models use a pretrained vision encoder, while some recent recipes train the encoder from scratch with the language model or remove it entirely. Vision encoders bundle together three design choices: a visual prior from upstream pretraining, dedicated vision capacity, and pre-fusion placement of that capacity (i.e., before the multimodal backbone). Because published models also differ in data, architecture, and compute, comparing them cannot isolate the effect of each choice. We disentangle these choices via a controlled framework where we pretrain all models from scratch on common data and compare them on visual question answering and language benchmarks at matched lifetime compute. We find that the visual prior is not necessary; an encoder trained jointly from scratch is on par with a pretrained one, without a separate training stage. What matters instead is dedicated vision capacity: an encoder-free model trails on visual understanding even when its backbone is enlarged by the encoder's parameter count. Yet that capacity need not precede multimodal fusion, as vision-only modules added in-fusion to early backbone layers perform comparably to a pre-fusion encoder and can lower time to first token. These results also hold across backbone sizes, when encoder pretraining is treated as free, and when starting from a pretrained language model. Overall, our findings favor dedicated vision capacity trained jointly with the backbone and placed early within it.
ArchSpace: Recording, Reviewing, and Referencing LLM Architecture Research
Model architecture shapes the scaling behavior, training efficiency, and inference cost of LLMs, making it a central focus of both industry and academia. In industry, teams such as those behind DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi routinely introduce architectural innovations, yet public reports rarely document which ideas succeeded, which were abandoned, and why. In academia, limited compute and inconsistent baselines often restrict evaluations to small-scale, single-point comparisons, making it difficult to establish whether improvements hold at larger scales or translate into broader impact. ArchSpace addresses both gaps as a public platform for Recording, Reviewing, and Referencing Architecture Researc}: each proposal is recorded with its experiments and reasoning, reviewed by the community, and referenced by later work. To evaluate ideas before costly large-scale training, ArchSpace leverages scaling laws to predict model loss at larger scales from smaller experiments, a practice widely adopted in industry. We provide initial references that make the platform usable: Qwen3.5 and OLMo3 baselines, fitted scaling laws, and a reusable training recipe. Ideas validated through this review can in turn become new baselines, and ArchSpace thereby aims to broaden the range of ideas that shape the next generation of models.
Internalizing Investment Mandates: A Neurosymbolic RL Approach to Portfolio Allocation
Institutional portfolios operate under investment policy statements that specify asset allocation constraints, often conditioned on market regime information. Deep reinforcement learning has been shown to optimize financial performance but typically does not enforce rule compliance, making it unsuitable for real-world deployment. Existing neurosymbolic methods such as Probabilistic Logic Policy Gradient (PLPG) offer constraint-satisfying reinforcement learning (RL) via differentiable symbolic supervision but assume a finite, discrete action space. We present a PLPG-inspired continuous allocation method that estimates the probability that the policy's own executed action satisfies the investment mandate, using reparameterized Monte Carlo sampling, and adds it to the training objective. No post-hoc enforcement mechanism intercepts actions at inference time and compliance is learned by the agent. Audited directly on deterministic mean actions with no correction, the policy reduces violations of a six-rule regime-conditional mandate from 96-98% for unconstrained RL and 33.4% for a reward-penalty baseline to 4.8%, showing that a continuous-action neurosymbolic policy can substantially internalize a symbolic mandate.
AgentSSL: Can MLE Agents Leverage Unlabeled Data?
Applying machine learning systems to new domains introduces bottlenecks in both labeled data acquisition and manual pipeline engineering. While recent MLE agents show promise in automating pipeline design, they have been studied almost exclusively in fully supervised settings, leaving them untested in realistic regimes where labeled data is scarce but unlabeled data is abundant. In this work, we introduce Agentic Semi-Supervised Learning (AgentSSL), framing SSL as a program search problem and studying how agents navigate this space under limited supervision. We find that even under weak feedback and matched compute, agents can synthesize code that combines and adapts established SSL techniques, exceeding the strongest human-engineered baselines in 8 of 12 settings by up to +21.8%. However, our results identify program selection as a critical bottleneck in AgentSSL, where performance drops by as much as 47% when selecting based on the agent's feedback metric. To systematically study this bottleneck, we introduce ProgramSelectBench, a large-scale benchmark with a combined total of 16,977 agent-generated and human-engineered SSL programs, and evaluate both unsupervised and active program selection methods. We further evaluate AgentSSL on real-world ecology detection tasks, highlighting the opportunities and challenges of transferring agent-discovered strategies beyond controlled benchmarks.