Technology
TorchKM: A GPU-Oriented Library for Kernel Learning and Model Selection
Zhang, Yikai, Jia, Gaoxiang, Ding, Jie, Wang, Boxiang
TorchKM is an open-source library for kernel machines, including support vector machines, kernel logistic regression, and kernel quantile regression, with GPU acceleration. The library features a scikit-learn-style API and is designed to exploit GPU-friendly linear algebra, accelerating the full training and model-selection pipeline through intelligent reuse of matrix operations. Benchmarks show competitive predictive performance with substantial speedups over standard baselines. The efficiency and programmable design also make TorchKM a kernel-learning component for AI-driven workflows. Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/YikaiZhang95/torchkm, and the package can be easily installed via PyPI.
Express Language Modeling
Gong, Albert, Carrell, Annabelle Michael, Dwivedi, Raaz, Mackey, Lester
We introduce a new tool, Express, for converting a non-causal attention approximation into a causal approximation with matching approximation guarantees. When combined with the state-of-the-art Thinformer approximation, Express improves upon the best known causal attention guarantees, delivering $\log^{3/2}(n)/s$ approximation error with only $O(s)$ memory and $O(s^2 \log^2(n))$ compression overhead for a sequence of length $n$. We pair these developments with an efficient I/O-aware Triton implementation, demonstrate substantial speedups over FlashAttention 2, and use Express to overcome four resource bottlenecks in the language modeling pipeline: long-context prefill, KV cache compression, long-form memory-constrained decoding, and long-form compute-constrained decoding.
Rank Collapse, Fixed Points, and the Renormalization Group Structure of MLP Residual Networks
Haggi-Mani, Parviz, Rish, Irina
The analogy between deep neural network forward passes and renormalization group (RG) flows has been repeatedly noted in the literature, but existing treatments remain qualitative: depth is described as a coarse-graining scale, attention is likened to a partition function, and representations are said to flow toward fixed points. No existing work has defined a measurable RG order parameter, tested it under controlled variation of the input distribution, or made quantitative predictions that are empirically verified. We study the simplest architecture for which the analogy is tractable: a pure MLP residual stack trained on masked token prediction over synthetic Markov chain sequences with known spectral properties. We report three findings. (i) The effective rank of the residual stream decreases monotonically with depth after training, consistent with progressive integration of irrelevant degrees of freedom. (ii) This rank collapse is selective: it occurs for chains with short correlation length approximately 1 but is absent for chains with long correlation length approximately 7, measured at the position level to control for mean-pooling artifacts. The network preserves exactly the degrees of freedom relevant to the prediction task, the content of the RG relevance criterion. (iii) Inter-layer kernel drift is concentrated at one or two specific transitions, with the remainder of the network near a fixed point, consistent with a discrete fixed-point plateau. Together these findings constitute the first quantitative, position-level evidence that MLP residual networks implement a selective coarse-graining procedure governed by the spectral structure of the input distribution.
SHGR: A Generalized Maximal Correlation Coefficient
Traditional correlation measures, such as Pearson's and Spearman's coefficients, are limited in their ability to capture complex relationships, particularly nonlinear and multivariate dependencies. The Hirschfeld-Gebelein-Rényi (HGR) maximal correlation offers a powerful alternative by measuring the highest Pearson correlation achievable through nonlinear transformations of two random variables. However, estimating the HGR coefficient remains challenging due to the complexity of optimizing arbitrary nonlinear functions. We introduce a new coefficient, satisfying Rényi's axioms, based on the extension of HGR with Spearman's rank correlation: the Spearman HGR (SHGR). We propose a neural network-based estimator tailored to estimate (i) the bivariate correlation matrix, (ii) the multivariate correlations between a set of variables and another one, and (iii) the full correlation between two sets of variables. This estimate effectively detects nonlinear dependencies and demonstrates robustness to noise, outliers, and spurious correlations (hallucinations). Additionally, it achieves competitive computational efficiency through designed neural architectures. Comprehensive numerical experiments and feature selection tasks confirm that SHGR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.
GauDP: Reinventing Multi-Agent Collaboration through Gaussian-Image Synergy in Diffusion Policies
Despite significant advances in robotic policy generation, effective coordination in embodied multi-agent systems remains a fundamental challenge--particularly in scenarios where agents must balance individual perspectives with global environmental awareness. Existing approaches often struggle to balance fine-grained local control with comprehensive scene understanding, resulting in limited scalability and compromised collaboration quality.
Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Neural Block Linearization
The high inference demands of transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) pose substantial challenges in their deployment. To this end, we introduce (NBL), a novel framework for accelerating transformer model inference by replacing self-attention layers with linear approximations derived from Linear Minimum Mean Squared Error estimators. NBL leverages Canonical Correlation Analysis to compute a theoretical upper bound on the approximation error. Then, we use this bound as a criterion for substitution, selecting the LLM layers with the lowest linearization error. NBL can be efficiently applied to pre-trained LLMs without the need for fine-tuning. In experiments, NBL achieves notable computational speed-ups while preserving competitive accuracy on multiple reasoning benchmarks. For instance, applying NBL to 12 self-attention layers in increases the inference speed by 32% with less than 1% accuracy trade-off, making it a flexible and promising solution to improve the inference efficiency of LLMs.
Jackie and Shadow's chicks' genders revealed: It's a boy…and a girl!
Environment Animals Wildlife Birds Jackie and Shadow's chicks' genders revealed: It's a boy and a girl! Sandy and Luna are now 9 weeks old. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Sandy is larger than Luna, as is typical for female bald eagles. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week.
Distilled Decoding 2: One-step Sampling of Image Auto-regressive Models with Conditional Score Distillation
Image Auto-regressive (AR) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm of visual generative models. Despite their promising performance, they suffer from slow generation speed due to the large number of sampling steps required. Although Distilled Decoding 1 (DD1) was recently proposed to enable few-step sampling for image AR models, it still incurs significant performance degradation in the one-step setting, and relies on a pre-defined mapping that limits its flexibility. In this work, we propose a new method, Distilled Decoding 2 (DD2), to further advances the feasibility of one-step sampling for image AR models. Unlike DD1, DD2 does not without rely on a pre-defined mapping.
Is the acquisition worth the cost? Surrogate losses for Consistent Two-stage Classifiers
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of a spectrum of foundation models, covering a broad range of capabilities and costs. Often, we effectively use foundation models as feature generators and train classifiers that use the outputs of these models to make decisions. In this paper, we consider an increasingly relevant setting where we have two classifier stages. The first stage has access to features $x$ and has the option to make a classification decision or defer, while incurring a cost, to a second classifier that has access to features $x$ and $z$. This is similar to the ``learning to defer'' setting, with the important difference that we train both classifiers jointly, and the second classifier has access to more information. The natural loss for this setting is an $\ell_{01c}$ loss, where a penalty is paid for incorrect classification, as in $\ell_{01}$, but an additional penalty $c$ is paid for consulting the second classifier. The $\ell_{01c}$ loss is unwieldy for training. Our primary contribution in this paper is the derivation of a hinge-based surrogate loss $\ell^c_{hinge}$ that is much more amenable to training but also satisfies the property that $\ell^c_{hinge}$-consistency implies $\ell_{01c}$-consistency.
WISA: World simulator assistant for physics-aware text-to-video generation
Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation, exemplified by models such as Sora and Kling, have demonstrated strong potential for constructing world simulators. However, existing T2V models still struggle to understand abstract physical principles and to generate videos that faithfully obey physical laws. This limitation stems primarily from the lack of explicit physical guidance, caused by a significant gap between high-level physical concepts and the generative capabilities of current models.