Pith. sign in

REVIEW 12 cited by

The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2312.13558 v1 pith:5YVXVX5F submitted 2023-12-21 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CLcs.CV

The Truth is in There: Improving Reasoning in Language Models with Layer-Selective Rank Reduction

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CLcs.CV
keywords modelslanguagedataincreasinglaserlayer-selectivellmsrank
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become a fixture in modern machine learning. Correspondingly, significant resources are allocated towards research that aims to further advance this technology, typically resulting in models of increasing size that are trained on increasing amounts of data. This work, however, demonstrates the surprising result that it is often possible to significantly improve the performance of LLMs by selectively removing higher-order components of their weight matrices. This simple intervention, which we call LAyer-SElective Rank reduction (LASER), can be done on a model after training has completed, and requires no additional parameters or data. We show extensive experiments demonstrating the generality of this finding across language models and datasets, and provide in-depth analyses offering insights into both when LASER is effective and the mechanism by which it operates.

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 12 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Tapered Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Tapered Language Models monotonically decrease MLP width across depth with a cosine schedule, yielding better perplexity and downstream performance than uniform-width baselines across multiple architectures and scales...

  2. Where Pretraining writes and Alignment reads: the asymmetry of Transformer weight space

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Pretraining and alignment induce asymmetric geometric traces in transformer weights because alignment updates concentrate in read pathways due to activation covariance while write pathways inherit less structure from ...

  3. Concepts Whisper While Syntax Shouts: Spectral Anti-Concentration and the Dual Geometry of Transformer Representations

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Transformer activations show spectral anti-concentration for concepts in the tail while syntax prefers high-variance directions, forming a dual geometry.

  4. Are LLM Uncertainty and Correctness Encoded by the Same Features? A Functional Dissociation via Sparse Autoencoders

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Uncertainty and correctness in LLMs are encoded by distinct feature populations, with suppression of confounded features improving accuracy and reducing entropy.

  5. Holmes: A Benchmark to Assess the Linguistic Competence of Language Models

    cs.CL 2024-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Holmes is a probing benchmark compiling over 200 datasets from 270 studies to evaluate linguistic competence across syntax, morphology, semantics, reasoning, and discourse in more than 50 language models.

  6. SCOPE and SCION: A Benchmark and an Auditable Reference Pipeline for Schema Induction and Fusion from Text

    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    A 24-dataset benchmark for inducing schema graphs from raw text, plus an auditable LLM-based pipeline that reports the highest scores on the benchmark's four schema-similarity metrics.

  7. Spectral Unforgetting: Post-Hoc Recovery of Damaged Capabilities Without Retraining

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DG-Hard uses Donoho-Gavish hard thresholding on the fine-tuning weight delta to separate task-aligned signal from noise-like residual, recovering damaged capabilities while preserving target-task gains.

  8. Importance-Guided Basis Selection for Low-Rank Decomposition of Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BSI ranks singular-vector bases for LLM low-rank compression by estimating expected task loss increase via second-order Taylor expansion of the loss and an efficient Hessian-diagonal estimator, outperforming magnitude...

  9. DASH-KV: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Asymmetric KV Cache Hashing

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    DASH-KV accelerates long-context LLM inference to linear complexity via asymmetric KV cache hashing and mixed-precision retention, matching full attention performance on LongBench.

  10. Aletheia: Gradient-Guided Layer Selection for Efficient LoRA Fine-Tuning Across Architectures

    cs.LG 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    Gradient-guided layer selection for LoRA yields 15-28% training speedup with matched downstream results on MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval across 14 models from 0.5B to 72B parameters.

  11. HTMuon: Improving Muon via Heavy-Tailed Spectral Correction

    cs.LG 2026-03 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    HTMuon modifies Muon to produce heavier-tailed updates and weight spectra via HT-SR theory, yielding up to 0.98 lower perplexity on LLaMA pretraining and serving as a plug-in for other Muon variants.

  12. Accelerating Attention with Basis Decomposition

    cs.LG 2025-10 reject novelty 3.0

    A low-rank factorization of attention projection matrices (basis plus coefficients) gives modest FLOP savings in exact arithmetic, but the claimed losslessness and novelty are not supported.