#01Oct 16, 2026
cs.AI
FuTransformer: FP8 prefill and INT4 decode for Llama-style inference on Hopper
Wei Wang
Transformer prefill reuses weights across tokens and is dominated by matrix multiplication and activation data movement; single-token decode has limited reuse and is dominated by weight and KV-cache reads. We present FUTRANSFORMER, a CUDA implementation of a Llama-style Transformer block for NVIDIA Hopper GPUs. It applies CODA's GEMM-plus-epilogue approach to inference, adding direct KV-cache placement, folding the fixed RMSNorm gain into weights, writing FP8 output directly with delayed scaling, and supporting prefill without padding. Decode uses INT4 projection weights and an INT4 KV-cache copy. Weights and keys follow Tensor Core fragment layouts for direct dequantization into MMA operands without full intermediate tiles. A block-diagonal Hadamard transform reduces cache quantization error from outlier channels. On one H100, prefill is up to 1.48x faster than compiled PyTorch FP8 and reaches 1.29 PFLOP/s. For gate/up projection with SwiGLU at the 8B shape, our BF16 path is 1.13x faster than CODA. Our FP8 path is 2.02-2.18x faster than the evaluated BF16 CODA path. Across 8B and 70B shapes at batches 1-32, INT4 decode is 1.3-2.4x faster than the faster of PyTorch's BF16 and INT4 blocks at each point: 2.1-3.3x faster than compiled, CUDA-graphed BF16 and 1.3-6.3x faster than the same block using PyTorch's INT4 projection kernel, which targets a single query row and loses to BF16 at batch 32. It is also 31-51% faster than our FP8 path. Complete Llama-3.1-8B decode takes 2.8 ms per step at batch one, versus 8.1 ms for the compiled transformers implementation. Decoding every WikiText-2 token through the INT4 weight path raises perplexity from 6.24 to 7.23 with round-to-nearest weights or 6.99 with GPTQ in the same format; the rotated INT4 cache adds 0.20. The kernels match a quantized reference computation within 0.001 perplexity.
#02Oct 16, 2026
cs.LG
Waiting Buys Exactly Two Moments: Endogenous Identification in Prediction-Driven Allocation
Rama AlHamidi, Rasul Khanbayov, Erchin Serpedin and 1 more
A planner with a fixed budget of preventive help must decide whom to help and when. Waiting reveals risk but removes intervention opportunities as higher-risk individuals leave first. We characterize this tradeoff under repeated noisy signals and risk-dependent attrition: in the canonical model, a length-$τ$ observation prefix identifies exactly the latent risk moments $m_j=\mathbb E[p^j]$ for $j=0,\ldots,2τ-1$, buying two new moments per additional period. These identify average next-period attrition among survivors but need not identify allocation welfare or attrition among those prioritized for treatment. Our observationally equivalent constructions establish unavoidable timing regret at any sample size for a fixed observation length, while exact certificates determine whether all compatible populations share a unique optimal date. Matched experiments separate the effects of estimation, bootstrap averaging, and regret weighting. Longer observation often resolves timing ambiguity, but the optimal date may already have passed. In our experiments, bootstrap averaging and early stopping improve decisions, while regret weighting adds no improvement in pooled mean squared regret: better statistical fit need not yield better allocation welfare. The code and artifacts are available at https://github.com/KurbanIntelligenceLab/waiting-buys-two-moments.
#03Oct 16, 2026
cs.AI
Self-Building Labs
Jiaru Bai, Yuchi Zhao, Han Hao and 4 more
Self-driving laboratories (SDLs) accelerate scientific discovery by automating experimental execution and optimization. AI agents can increasingly propose new experiments, but existing SDLs can only run the procedures they were built for. Adapting them to a new experiment still takes extensive manual engineering, which makes laboratory flexibility the bottleneck for scaling discovery. We introduce the self-building laboratory (SBL), which designs, configures, and operates its own laboratory setup given a high-level scientific goal. SBL starts from whatever already exists, from an empty room to a working SDL, and builds the missing capabilities: the lab layout, its digital twin, robot skills, and experimental workflows. We demonstrate the system working across different robots and setups, scaling from a single workstation to laboratories with several robots working together. We validate SBL's end-to-end capabilities through a real-world quantum-dot synthesis experiment. By shifting the role of human researchers from manually configuring and programming device automation to specifying scientific objectives, SBL makes scientific automation more accessible, flexible, and scalable. Project website: https://self-building-labs.github.io/
#04Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
Video Diffusion Avatars: Taming Video Diffusion Models into Controllable 3D Avatars
Simon Giebenhain, Tobias Kirschstein, Liam Schoneveld and 3 more
Video diffusion models (VDMs) trained on internet-scale data encode a rich prior on appearance, motion, and physics that is difficult to replicate with explicit 3D rendering and costly 3D data capture. We introduce Video Diffusion Avatars (VDAs), a method that creates photo-realistic, multi-view consistent avatars from a single image by fine-tuning a VDM for precise control over camera viewpoint, facial expression, and upper-body pose. Departing from 3D morphable models (3DMMs), VDAs use a learned expression space that lifts the expressiveness ceiling of 3DMMs, e.g., for the tongue and mouth interior. However, learned expression codes exhibit heavy viewpoint bias, as our DISTRACT benchmark reveals. We show that this bias can be removed through disentanglement, enabling their use as driving signals for multi-view consistent avatars. Camera and upper-body pose are controlled jointly via proxy-mesh renderings, giving independent control over expression, pose, and viewpoint. A camera-triplet training strategy makes the approach efficient: our models train for 34 hours on a single A100 using only public multi-view data. VDAs outperform state-of-the-art single-image 3D avatars on novel-view reenactment, reducing face LPIPS by 29% and improving perceptual quality (JOD) by 66% on BecomingLit. A static 3DGS reconstruction probe further confirms that our generations are the most multi-view consistent. Built on a video prior, VDAs produce effects beyond the reach of explicit renderers, including physically plausible hair dynamics, shadows, reflections, and refractions.
#05Oct 16, 2026
cs.CV
Persistent Planar Memory for Video World Models
Yuze He, Bin Tan, Zelin Gao and 4 more
Video world models that generate and explore environments at scale need a persistent 3D memory of what they have produced. Plane primitives offer a natural candidate: a compact set of oriented planes captures the dominant structural elements (e.g., walls, floors, facades) of indoor and outdoor scenes, while requiring only 7 parameters per primitive. We present PPMem, a video world model that adopts plane primitives as its persistent 3D memory. PPMem augments a video diffusion transformer with a planar prediction head and a Depth Token Fusion (DTF) module: each autoregressive chunk jointly produces RGB video and planar geometry, which merges into a persistent plane memory that conditions subsequent chunks via rendered depth. The resulting memory is three orders of magnitude more compact than per-pixel point clouds (~100K primitives, 5MB for a full scene), geometrically explicit (metric depth, normals, exportable surfaces), cross-view consistent (jointly predicted by the shared backbone), and adaptive (refined by the merging procedure as generation proceeds). On DL3DV and RealEstate10K, PPMem outperforms prior 3D-grounded world models in video quality while jointly producing metric-scale depth, surface normals, and exportable planar geometry, sustaining coherence across hundreds of frames under large viewpoint changes. Project page: https://hyzcluster.github.io/ppmem.