EditMGT applies masked generative transformers with attention consolidation and region-hold sampling to deliver state-of-the-art localized image editing at 6x the speed of diffusion methods.
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Gemma 2: Improving Open Language Models at a Practical Size
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In this work, we introduce Gemma 2, a new addition to the Gemma family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models, ranging in scale from 2 billion to 27 billion parameters. In this new version, we apply several known technical modifications to the Transformer architecture, such as interleaving local-global attentions (Beltagy et al., 2020a) and group-query attention (Ainslie et al., 2023). We also train the 2B and 9B models with knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) instead of next token prediction. The resulting models deliver the best performance for their size, and even offer competitive alternatives to models that are 2-3 times bigger. We release all our models to the community.
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- abstract In this work, we introduce Gemma 2, a new addition to the Gemma family of lightweight, state-of-the-art open models, ranging in scale from 2 billion to 27 billion parameters. In this new version, we apply several known technical modifications to the Transformer architecture, such as interleaving local-global attentions (Beltagy et al., 2020a) and group-query attention (Ainslie et al., 2023). We also train the 2B and 9B models with knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) instead of next token prediction. The resulting models deliver the best performance for their size, and even offer compe
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representative citing papers
Acceptance Cards is a new four-diagnostic standard for safe fine-tuning defense claims that requires statistical reliability, fresh semantic generalization, mechanism alignment, and cross-task transfer; under this protocol SafeLoRA fails the full-card pass on Gemma-2-2B-it.
SLAM achieves 100% detection on Gemma-2 models with only 1-2 point quality cost by causally steering SAE-identified residual-stream directions for linguistic structure.
ArgBench unifies 33 existing datasets into a standardized benchmark for testing LLMs across 46 argumentation tasks and analyzes the impact of prompting techniques and model factors on performance.
LiveBench is a contamination-limited LLM benchmark with auto-scored challenging tasks from recent sources across math, coding, reasoning and more, where top models score below 70%.
Introduces applicability condition extraction for therapeutic drug-disease relations, creates first annotated dataset of 1,119 pairs, and proposes enhanced LoRA method outperforming baselines.
Moral Trolley Arena shows frontier LLMs produce composite moral preferences that are compressed rather than additive functions of calibrated component act strengths across Moral Foundations Theory.
A deferral mechanism using forward-looking simulations reduces false positives in derailment forecasting by selectively waiting when recovery paths appear plausible.
Representational convergence across 16 LLMs on 800 reasoning problems is stronger for failed tasks and pre-decision stages but shows minimal causal influence on predictions, pointing to shared processing constraints over shared reasoning.
A test-time zeroth-order optimization of prompt embeddings using a bounded self-supervised proxy from demonstration log-probabilities improves ICL accuracy and correlates with gains across tasks.
GraphFlow uses a unified wGraph to dynamically instantiate workflows and manage KV caches for LLM agents, reporting 4.95 pp average gains and 4x memory reduction on five benchmarks.
Tensor Cache augments sliding-window attention with an eviction-fed outer-product associative memory and a training correction to improve long-context performance under bounded memory.
In 1-3B instruction-tuned LMs on GSM8K, arithmetic CoT readout is dominated by positional copying of the trailing number before the answer delimiter, accounting for 54-92 percentage points of accuracy.
Chronicle is the first model jointly pretrained from scratch on text and time series in a unified transformer that matches a comparable language model on NLU tasks and sets new bars for time series classification and multimodal forecasting.
A new speculative inference system speeds up diffusion VLAs to 19.1 ms average latency (3.04x faster) on LIBERO by replacing most full 58 ms inferences with 7.8 ms draft rounds while preserving task performance.
Symmetries in next-token prediction targets induce corresponding geometric symmetries such as circulant matrices and equiangular tight frames in the optimal weights and embeddings of a layer-peeled LLM surrogate model.
Large language models achieve macro F1 scores above 0.85 on binary nominal-versus-danger classification from CTAF radio transcripts and METAR weather data using a new synthetic dataset with a 12-category hazard taxonomy.
Develops a causal framework unifying generative AI fairness with standard ML, with new decompositions, identification conditions, and estimators demonstrated on LLM race and gender bias.
Behavioral directions from one LLM family transfer to others via projection into a shared anchor coordinate space, yielding 0.83 ten-way detection accuracy and steering effects up to 0.46% on held-out models.
PLOT localizes causal variables in neural networks by fitting optimal transport couplings between abstract and neural intervention effect geometries, enabling fast handles or guided search.
GLoRA replaces raw factor averaging with gauge-aware aggregation in a consensus subspace estimated from client projectors, enabling consistent low-rank federated LoRA under heterogeneity.
Linear probes on LM hidden states detect grammaticality better than string probabilities, generalize to human benchmarks and other languages, and correlate weakly with likelihood.
Themis introduces the largest open code preference dataset with over 350k pairs and trains multilingual reward models from 600M to 32B parameters that support flexible multi-criteria scoring, with experiments showing scaling trends and cross-lingual transfer.
E-MIA converts document details into four types of exam questions and aggregates the RAG's answers into a membership score that separates member and non-member documents better than prior similarity-based or probe-based attacks.
citing papers explorer
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GraphFlow: A Graph-Based Workflow Management for Efficient LLM-Agent Serving
GraphFlow uses a unified wGraph to dynamically instantiate workflows and manage KV caches for LLM agents, reporting 4.95 pp average gains and 4x memory reduction on five benchmarks.
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Tensor Cache: Eviction-conditioned Associative Memory for Transformers
Tensor Cache augments sliding-window attention with an eviction-fed outer-product associative memory and a training correction to improve long-context performance under bounded memory.
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The Readout Shortcut: Positional Number Copying Dominates Arithmetic CoT Readout in Small Language Models
In 1-3B instruction-tuned LMs on GSM8K, arithmetic CoT readout is dominated by positional copying of the trailing number before the answer delimiter, accounting for 54-92 percentage points of accuracy.
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Chronicle: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Joint Language and Time Series Understanding
Chronicle is the first model jointly pretrained from scratch on text and time series in a unified transformer that matches a comparable language model on NLU tasks and sets new bars for time series classification and multimodal forecasting.
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PLOT: Progressive Localization via Optimal Transport in Neural Causal Abstraction
PLOT localizes causal variables in neural networks by fitting optimal transport couplings between abstract and neural intervention effect geometries, enabling fast handles or guided search.
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Beyond Factor Aggregation: Gauge-Aware Low-Rank Server Representations for Federated LoRA
GLoRA replaces raw factor averaging with gauge-aware aggregation in a consensus subspace estimated from client projectors, enabling consistent low-rank federated LoRA under heterogeneity.
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Auto-FlexSwitch: Efficient Dynamic Model Merging via Learnable Task Vector Compression
Auto-FlexSwitch achieves efficient dynamic model merging by decomposing task vectors into sparse masks, signs, and scalars, then making the compression learnable via gating and adaptive bit selection with KNN-based retrieval.
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How Much Is One Recurrence Worth? Iso-Depth Scaling Laws for Looped Language Models
A fitted iso-depth scaling law measures that one recurrence in looped transformers is worth r^0.46 unique blocks in validation loss.
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Are LLM Uncertainty and Correctness Encoded by the Same Features? A Functional Dissociation via Sparse Autoencoders
Uncertainty and correctness in LLMs are encoded by distinct feature populations, with suppression of confounded features improving accuracy and reducing entropy.
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MetaSAEs: Joint Training with a Decomposability Penalty Produces More Atomic Sparse Autoencoder Latents
Joint training of a primary SAE with a meta SAE that applies a decomposability penalty on decoder directions produces more atomic latents, shown by 7.5% lower mean absolute phi and 7.6% higher fuzzing scores on GPT-2.
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Activation Steering with a Feedback Controller
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Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach
A recurrent-depth architecture enables language models to improve reasoning performance by iterating computation in latent space, achieving gains equivalent to much larger models on benchmarks.
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GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
LLMs display high variance and major accuracy drops on GSM-Symbolic variants of grade-school math problems, indicating they replicate training patterns rather than execute logical reasoning.
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Time Series as Language: A Universal Tokenizer for General-Purpose Time Series Foundation Models
UniTok tokenizes time series for an off-the-shelf LLM foundation model that unifies forecasting, generation, and classification through next-token prediction and training-free inference.
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General Preference Reinforcement Learning
GPRL carries a k-dimensional skew-symmetric preference structure into policy updates with per-dimension advantages and a drift monitor, yielding 56.51% length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0 from Llama-3-8B-Instruct while outperforming SimPO and SPPO on other benchmarks.
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Are Sparse Autoencoder Benchmarks Reliable?
An audit of SAEBench reveals that Targeted Probe Perturbation and Spurious Correlation Removal metrics fail reliability tests and should not be used to evaluate sparse autoencoders.
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Geometry-Lite: Interpretable Safety Probing via Layer-Wise Margin Geometry
Geometry-Lite decomposes LLM safety detection into layer-wise margin geometries and finds that persistent boundary positions, not layer-to-layer drift, drive most detection performance across nine models and seven benchmarks.
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Scale Determines Whether Language Models Organize Representation Geometry for Prediction
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Self-Pruned Key-Value Attention: Learning When to Write by Predicting Future Utility
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Not Just RLHF: Why Alignment Alone Won't Fix Multi-Agent Sycophancy
Base LLMs show multi-agent yield to peer pressure at rates equal to or higher than aligned models, localized by activation patching to mid-layers where attention dominates, with one dissenter cutting yield by 54-73 points while prompt defenses fail on variants.
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Learning with Rare Success but Rich Feedback via Reflection-Enhanced Self-Distillation
RESD turns failure trajectories into token-level supervision via retrospective reflections and a persistent global playbook, enabling faster improvement than standard self-distillation or GRPO with only one rollout per prompt.
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Layer-wise Representation Dynamics: An Empirical Investigation Across Embedders and Base LLMs
LRD framework with Frenet, NRS, and GFMI metrics shows layer-wise structure in 31 models provides usable signal for model selection and pruning on MTEB tasks.
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Leveraging RAG for Training-Free Alignment of LLMs
RAG-Pref is a training-free RAG-based alignment technique that conditions LLMs on contrastive preference samples during inference, yielding over 3.7x average improvement in agentic attack refusals when combined with offline methods across five LLMs.
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Accelerating Zeroth-Order Spectral Optimization with Partial Orthogonalization from Power Iteration
ZO-MOPI accelerates zeroth-order LLM fine-tuning by applying partial spectral orthogonalization from power iteration inside a momentum-projected subspace to reduce variance and exploit dominant directions.
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Causal Dimensionality of Transformer Representations: Measurement, Scaling, and Layer Structure
Causal dimensionality kappa of transformer layers grows sub-linearly with SAE width, remains invariant to model scale, and stays constant across depth while attribution thresholds drop sharply.
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Towards Generation-Efficient Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models
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CuBridge: An LLM-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing High-Performance Attention Kernels
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Conceptors for Semantic Steering
Conceptors as soft projection matrices from bipolar activations offer a multidimensional, compositional, and geometrically principled method for semantic steering in LLMs that outperforms single-vector baselines in multi-dimensional subspaces.
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Multilingual Safety Alignment via Self-Distillation
MSD enables cross-lingual safety transfer in LLMs via self-distillation with Dual-Perspective Safety Weighting, improving safety in low-resource languages without target response data.
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Minimizing Collateral Damage in Activation Steering
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Diversity in Large Language Models under Supervised Fine-Tuning
TOFU loss mitigates the narrowing of generative diversity in LLMs after supervised fine-tuning by addressing neglect of low-frequency patterns and forgetting of prior knowledge.
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MGDA-Decoupled: Geometry-Aware Multi-Objective Optimisation for DPO-based LLM Alignment
MGDA-Decoupled applies geometry-based multi-objective optimization within the DPO framework to find shared descent directions that account for each objective's convergence dynamics, yielding higher win rates on UltraFeedback.
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Do LLM-derived graph priors improve multi-agent coordination?
LLM-generated coordination graph priors improve multi-agent reinforcement learning performance on MPE benchmarks, with models as small as 1.5B parameters proving effective.
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Predicting Where Steering Vectors Succeed
The Linear Accessibility Profile predicts steering vector effectiveness and optimal layers with Spearman correlations of 0.86-0.91 using unembedding projections on intermediate states across multiple models and concepts.
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The Illusion of Equivalence: Systematic FP16 Divergence in KV-Cached Autoregressive Inference
FP16 KV caching in transformers causes deterministic token divergence versus cache-free inference due to non-associative floating-point accumulation orderings.
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Latent Instruction Representation Alignment: defending against jailbreaks, backdoors and undesired knowledge in LLMs
LIRA aligns latent instruction representations in LLMs to defend against jailbreaks, backdoors, and undesired knowledge, blocking over 99% of PEZ attacks and achieving optimal WMDP forgetting.
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What Drives Representation Steering? A Mechanistic Case Study on Steering Refusal
Steering vectors for refusal primarily modify the OV circuit in attention, ignore most of the QK circuit, and can be sparsified to 1-10% of dimensions while retaining performance.
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Tree-of-Evidence: Efficient "System 2" Search for Faithful Multimodal Grounding
Tree-of-Evidence frames multimodal interpretability as discrete optimization and uses beam search with evidence bottlenecks to recover compact evidence sets that reproduce model predictions at over 0.98 of full AUROC.
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Improving Robustness In Sparse Autoencoders via Masked Regularization
Masked regularization in sparse autoencoders disrupts token co-occurrences to reduce feature absorption, enhance probing, and narrow OOD gaps across architectures and sparsity levels.
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The Master Key Hypothesis: Unlocking Cross-Model Capability Transfer via Linear Subspace Alignment
The Master Key Hypothesis states that capabilities are low-dimensional directions transferable across models through linear subspace alignment, with UNLOCK demonstrating gains such as 12.1% accuracy improvement on MATH when transferring CoT from 14B to 7B models.
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AdaHOP: Fast and Accurate Low-Precision Training via Outlier-Pattern-Aware Rotation
AdaHOP applies pattern-aware Hadamard transforms and selective outlier extraction to enable from-scratch MXFP4 training of LLMs at BF16 quality with up to 3.6X memory compression and 1.46X speedup.
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LLM-AutoDP: Automatic Data Processing via LLM Agents for Model Fine-tuning
LLM agents iteratively generate and optimize data processing strategies for fine-tuning, delivering over 80% win rates versus unprocessed data and 65% versus LLM-based AutoML baselines while cutting search time by up to 10x.
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SpikingBrain: Spiking Brain-inspired Large Models
SpikingBrain-7B and SpikingBrain-76B achieve Transformer-comparable performance after continual pre-training on 150B tokens, with over 100x TTFT speedup on 4M-token sequences and 69.15% sparsity from event-driven spiking.
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Exploring the Secondary Risks of Large Language Models
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Muon is Scalable for LLM Training
Muon optimizer with weight decay and update scaling achieves ~2x efficiency over AdamW for large LLMs, shown via the Moonlight 3B/16B MoE model trained on 5.7T tokens.
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Flex Attention: A Programming Model for Generating Optimized Attention Kernels
FlexAttention supplies a compiler-driven interface that expresses common attention variants in a few lines of PyTorch and emits optimized kernels whose speed matches hand-written implementations.
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AGPO: Adaptive Group Policy Optimization with Dual Statistical Feedback
AGPO adaptively sets trust-region size and exploration temperature from group reward dispersion, entropy, and KL drift, yielding higher scores than PPO and GRPO on nine math benchmarks under fixed token budget.
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R2V Agent: Teaching SLMs When to Ask for Help
R2V-Agent combines an SLM policy trained via BC and DPO with a step-level risk-calibrated router using Brier scores and CVaR to escalate to LLM only on high residual failure risk, improving success-cost tradeoffs on HumanEval+, TextWorld, and TerminalBench.
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Position: Zeroth-Order Optimization in Deep Learning Is Underexplored, Not Underpowered
Zeroth-order optimization is underexplored rather than underpowered in deep learning, with limitations stemming from full-space designs that can be addressed via subspace, spectral, and systems-aware approaches.
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Pion: A Spectrum-Preserving Optimizer via Orthogonal Equivalence Transformation
Pion is an optimizer that preserves the singular values of weight matrices in LLM training by applying orthogonal equivalence transformations.