#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
Advancing SVD-based LLM Compression via Layer-Wise Error Model Search
Moritz Thoma, Maximilian Groezinger, Maximilian Forstenhäusler and 8 more
Low-rank SVD-based compression offers a powerful strategy to reduce the computational costs of LLMs. However, existing methods face two key limitations: (i) global rank allocation, where uncalibrated error proxies fail to capture complex error propagation, and (ii) decomposition quality, where Fisher-based estimators suffer from severe rank collapse. In this work, we address these limitations by introducing Layer-wise Error Modeling Search (LEMS) and KFAC-SVD. LEMS advances rank allocation by introducing a layer-wise error surrogate that integrates local and global layer importance alongside a propagation bias, enabling effective global rank allocation via an ILP formulation. KFAC-SVD improves decomposition quality by utilizing token-wise statistics, mitigating the rank deficiency observed in prior Fisher-based SVD approaches. Across Mistral, Qwen3, and Llama 3 model families, we show that LEMS consistently outperforms existing search strategies, delivering significant zero-shot accuracy gains of up to 4.8 p.p. that generalize to model sizes of 70B parameters, while KFAC-SVD achieves an average perplexity improvement of 15%. Project page and code: https://lems-svd.github.io
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
NgramRL: Accelerating RL Post-Training for Structured Generation via Rollout-Aware N-gram Speculative Decoding
Nilesh Prasad Pandey, Jangseon Park, Jason Kong and 2 more
Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but its cost is dominated by autoregressive rollout generation, which can exceed 70% of training time. Existing speculative-decoding methods are poorly suited to this setting: model-based drafters consume scarce GPU memory and may become misaligned as the policy evolves, while existing model-free methods do not explicitly exploit repetition across training epochs. We observe that recent rollouts of the same prompt provide a high-quality, self-updating draft source. Based on this insight, we propose NgramRL, a per-prompt n-gram drafter constructed from bounded recent rollout history. NgramRL requires no auxiliary model, drafter training, or persistent GPU-resident drafter state, while target-model verification preserves the rollout distribution. To hide CPU cache lookup and scheduling, we further introduce an adaptive fan-out prefetcher that predicts likely verification outcomes (j, b), consisting of the accepted draft length j and target-emitted continuation token b. A causal budget allocator concentrates prefetches on high-probability outcomes, while uncovered outcomes fall back to sequential lookup without changing committed tokens. Across two model families and three reasoning and structured-generation workloads, NgramRL commits 3.60-7.77 tokens per target-model forward in the warm-cache regime, up to 1.99x more than SuffixDecoding and 7.0x more than prompt-lookup decoding. On Spider, the prefetcher covers 96.6% of Qwen3-8B outcomes at a candidate budget of 16 and improves measured rollout throughput by 1.38x over synchronous NgramRL, approaching its 1.40x overlap ceiling.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
Multiplicative vs. Additive State Coupling in Learned Optimizer Schedules
M. Harper Langston, Pierre-David Letourneau, Dalton Jones and 7 more
We learn schedules for a continuous penalty relaxation of MAX-CUT by backpropagating through an unrolled classical solver. A state-blind schedule generalizes to instances substantially larger than those used for training. A state-adaptive bilinear schedule also generalizes out of distribution, outperforming its untrained baseline across 15 seeds ($t=4.1$). By contrast, an additive ablation with identical inputs and output heads is statistically indistinguishable from the bilinear model in distribution but performs worse than its own baseline out of distribution ($t=-11.7$). This separation appears without regularization and persists across a $30$ round weight-decay sweep: the bilinear advantage remains significant at every tested value, whereas the additive model never recovers. The results in this setting isolate how solver state enters the schedule, rather than state adaptivity alone, as the architectural distinction associated with out-of-distribution transfer.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
From Deliberately Constructed Systemic Representations of the World of Activity to Dialogue: A Five-Level Communication Architecture for Strong Language-Based ASI
Maxim Osovsky
This paper proposes a five-level organization of message formation and understanding within thinking and activity in which ASI participates. Its central thesis is that a language model's context is fundamentally incapable of presenting the foundations of utterance formation for examination and verification. These foundations are established in advance by acquired schemas, systemic representations of the world of activity, and connections accepted as true within them. Neither context nor trained LLM weights, in themselves, attest to the presence of deliberately constructed systemic representations. The five levels distinguish systemic representations of the world of activity, a particular situation cut out from those representations, its narrative description, the full sense of a message, and text. A situation's schema-model is not identical to a story about it. A recipient reconstructs the full sense from an abbreviated text through jointly constructed and agreed-upon representations and joint activity. Reverse work proceeds from the full sense through an extended description and the situation's schema-model to the reconstruction of systemic foundations. The theoretical foundations draw on the systems methodology of G. P. Shchedrovitskiy, the structural differential of A. Korzybski, and the Meaning-Text theory of I. A. Mel'chuk. The contribution is a specific systemic-activity organization of content for examining and adjusting message foundations and controlling the consequences of their transformation. Further research concerns large graphical models of activity on reconstructible systemic foundations, distinct from text generation from context.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CV
SPOOK: Sparse Pixel Optimization for Off-Manifold Knowledge in Vision Encoders
Ankit Gupta, Akshat Pandya, Christoph Adami and 1 more
Modern vision encoders are widely used as semantic representations, but the relationship between embedding similarity and human-visible semantics can become unclear far from the natural-image manifold. We probe this regime in a black-box setting by applying sparse pixel edits to blank canvases with a simple pixel-level hill-climbing procedure. Across ImageNet and Flickr30k, we evaluate whether these edited blank canvases can retrieve chosen targets in multimodal contrastive encoders and self-supervised visual encoders. On OpenCLIP, inputs optimized toward class prompts achieve strong top-1 and top-5 targeted retrieval performance; on DINOv3, inputs optimized toward class prototypes achieve high target alignment and near-top prototype ranks. These results show that sparse edits on otherwise blank, visually non-semantic inputs can enter target semantic basins in both language-aligned and self-supervised visual representation spaces. Our findings identify a shared off-manifold failure mode of modern vision encoders and suggest sparse blank-canvas optimization as a simple probe of representation geometry.