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LOST: Low-rank and Sparse Pre-training for Large Language Models

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arxiv 2508.02668 v1 pith:DH2MY2Z4 submitted 2025-08-04 cs.LG

LOST: Low-rank and Sparse Pre-training for Large Language Models

classification cs.LG
keywords lostlow-ranksparsetextbftrainingcomponentsllmsmodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, their massive scale incurs prohibitive computational and memory costs for pre-training from scratch. Recent studies have investigated the use of low-rank parameterization as a means of reducing model size and training cost. In this context, sparsity is often employed as a complementary technique to recover important information lost in low-rank compression by capturing salient features in the residual space. However, existing approaches typically combine low-rank and sparse components in a simplistic or ad hoc manner, often resulting in undesirable performance degradation compared to full-rank training. In this paper, we propose \textbf{LO}w-rank and \textbf{S}parse pre-\textbf{T}raining (\textbf{LOST}) for LLMs, a novel method that ingeniously integrates low-rank and sparse structures to enable effective training of LLMs from scratch under strict efficiency constraints. LOST applies singular value decomposition to weight matrices, preserving the dominant low-rank components, while allocating the remaining singular values to construct channel-wise sparse components to complement the expressiveness of low-rank training. We evaluate LOST on LLM pretraining ranging from 60M to 7B parameters. Our experiments show that LOST achieves competitive or superior performance compared to full-rank models, while significantly reducing both memory and compute overhead. Moreover, Code is available at \href{https://github.com/JiaxiLi1/LOST-Low-rank-and-Sparse-Training-for-Large-Language-Models}{LOST Repo}

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

  1. Beyond Perplexity: A Geometric and Spectral Study of Low-Rank Pre-Training

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Low-rank pre-training methods converge to geometrically and spectrally distinct basins from full-rank training and from each other, even at similar validation perplexity.

  2. Beyond Perplexity: A Geometric and Spectral Study of Low-Rank Pre-Training

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Low-rank pre-training methods converge to geometrically and spectrally distinct basins and show diverging activations compared to full-rank training at 60M-350M scales.

  3. SLORR: Simple and Efficient In-Training Low-Rank Regularization

    cs.LG 2026-07 accept novelty 6.0

    A stateless, SVD-free regularizer approximates polar factors to induce low-rank weight structure during training, enabling better post-training compression of vision models and LLMs at under 8% overhead.

  4. Spectral Compact Training: Pre-Training Large Language Models via Permanent Truncated SVD and Stiefel QR Retraction

    cs.LG 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    SCT pre-trains LLMs by keeping weights as compact SVD factors with Stiefel QR retraction, delivering up to 199x memory reduction per layer and allowing 70B-parameter training on a Steam Deck.

  5. BOOST: BOttleneck-Optimized Scalable Training Framework for Low-Rank Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BOOST delivers 1.46-2.27x end-to-end speedups for low-rank bottleneck LLMs by redesigning tensor parallelism around the bottleneck structure plus supporting optimizations.

  6. CR-Net: Scaling Parameter-Efficient Training with Cross-Layer Low-Rank Structure

    cs.LG 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    CR-Net uses cross-layer low-rank residuals in a dual-path network plus specialized recomputation to outperform prior low-rank methods on 60M-7B model pre-training while using less compute and memory.

  7. Low-Rank Adaptation Redux for Large Models

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    An overview revisits LoRA variants by categorizing advances in architectural design, efficient optimization, and applications while linking them to classical signal processing tools for principled fine-tuning.