Deep Learning
What you need to know as Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman begins
What you need to know as Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman begins It's sure to be cringe, and may end up costing OpenAI billions. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026 in Washington, DC. In a few short days, jury selection will begin in the long-awaited case. At the end of that process, an Oakland federal court will task nine regular people with deciding if OpenAI defrauded Elon Musk when it announced, and recently completed, its reorganization to become a more traditional for-profit business . More than just being the venue where two billionaires will air their grievances against one another in public, the trial has the potential to reshape the AI industry.
Preserved central model for faster bidirectional compression in distributed settings
We develop a new approach to tackle communication constraints in a distributed learning problem with a central server. We propose and analyze a new algorithm that performs bidirectional compression and achieves the same convergence rate as algorithms using only uplink (from the local workers to the central server) compression. To obtain this improvement, we design MCM, an algorithm such that the downlink compression only impacts local models, while the global model is preserved. As a result, and contrary to previous works, the gradients on local servers are computed on perturbed models. Consequently, convergence proofs are more challenging and require a precise control of this perturbation. To ensure it, MCMadditionally combines model compression with a memory mechanism. This analysis opens new doors, e.g.
MCUNetV2: Memory-Efficient Patch-based Inference for Tiny Deep Learning
Tiny deep learning on microcontroller units (MCUs) is challenging due to the limited memory size. We find that the memory bottleneck is due to the imbalanced memory distribution in convolutional neural network (CNN) designs: the first several blocks have an order of magnitude larger memory usage than the rest of the network. To alleviate this issue, we propose a generic patch-by-patch inference scheduling, which operates only on a small spatial region of the feature map and significantly cuts down the peak memory. However, naive implementation brings overlapping patches and computation overhead. We further propose receptive field redistribution to shift the receptive field and FLOPs to the later stage and reduce the computation overhead. Manually redistributing the receptive field is difficult.
Efficient Equivariant Transfer Learning from Pretrained Models
Efficient transfer learning algorithms are key to the success of foundation models on diverse downstream tasks even with limited data. Recent works of Basu et al. (2023) and Kaba et al. (2022) propose group averaging (equitune) and optimizationbased methods, respectively, over features from group-transformed inputs to obtain equivariant outputs from non-equivariant neural networks. While Kaba et al. (2022) are only concerned with training from scratch, we find that equitune performs poorly on equivariant zero-shot tasks despite good finetuning results. We hypothesize that this is because pretrained models provide better quality features for certain transformations than others and simply averaging them is deleterious. Hence, we propose λ-equitune that averages the features using importance weights, λs. These weights are learned directly from the data using a small neural network, leading to excellent zero-shot and finetuned results that outperform equitune. Further, we prove that λ-equitune is equivariant and a universal approximator of equivariant functions. Additionally, we show that the method of Kaba et al. (2022) used with appropriate loss functions, which we call equizero, also gives excellent zero-shot and finetuned performance.
Circa: Stochastic ReLUs for Private Deep Learning
The simultaneous rise of machine learning as a service and concerns over user privacy have increasingly motivated the need for private inference (PI). While recent work demonstrates PI is possible using cryptographic primitives, the computational overheads render it impractical. State-of-art deep networks are inadequate in this context because the source of slowdown in PI stems from the ReLU operations whereas optimizations for plaintext inference focus on reducing FLOPs. In this paper we re-think ReLU computations and propose optimizations for PI tailored to properties of neural networks. Specifically, we reformulate ReLU as an approximate sign test and introduce a novel truncation method for the sign test that significantly reduces the cost per ReLU. These optimizations result in a specific type of stochastic ReLU. The key observation is that the stochastic fault behavior is well suited for the fault-tolerant properties of neural network inference. Thus, we provide significant savings without impacting accuracy. We collectively call the optimizations Circa and demonstrate improvements of up to 4.7 storage and 3 runtime over baseline implementations; we further show that Circa can be used on top of recent PI optimizations to obtain 1.8 additional speedup.