scalability
Scalable Fingerprinting of Large Language Models
Model fingerprinting has emerged as a powerful tool for model owners to identify their shared model given API access. In order to lower false discovery rate, fight fingerprint leakage, and defend against coalitions of model users attempting to bypass detection, we argue that scaling up the number of fingerprints one can embed into a model, i.e. Scalability of fingerprints, is critical. Hence, we pose scalability as a crucial requirement for fingerprinting schemes. We experiment with fingerprint design at a scale significantly larger than previously considered, and introduce a new method, dubbed Perinucleus sampling, to generate scalable, persistent, and harmless fingerprints. We demonstrate that this scheme can add 24,576 fingerprints to a Llama-3.1-8B
Large Language Diffusion Models
The capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are widely regarded as relying on autoregressive models (ARMs). We challenge this notion by introducing LLaDA, a diffusion model trained from scratch under the pre-training and supervised finetuning (SFT) paradigm. LLaDA employs a forward data masking process and a reverse generation process, parameterized by a Transformer to predict masked tokens. It provides a principled generative approach for probabilistic inference by optimizing a likelihood lower bound. Across extensive benchmarks on general tasks, math, code, and so on, LLaDA demonstrates strong scalability and performs comparably to our self-constructed ARM baselines. Remarkably, LLaDA 8B is competitive with strong LLMs like LLaMA3 8B in in-context learning and, after SFT, exhibits impressive instruction-following abilities in case studies such as multiturn dialogue. Moreover, LLaDA addresses the reversal curse, surpassing GPT-4o in a reversal poem completion task. Our findings show the promise of diffusion models for language modeling at scale and challenge the common assumption that core LLM capabilities discussed above inherently depend on ARMs.
Generative Graph Pattern Machine
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been predominantly driven by messagepassing, where node representations are iteratively updated via local neighborhood aggregation. Despite their success, message-passing suffers from fundamental limitations--including constrained expressiveness, over-smoothing, oversquashing, and limited capacity to model long-range dependencies. These issues hinder scalability: increasing data size or model size often fails to yield improved performance. To this end, we explore pathways beyond message-passing and introduce Generative Graph Pattern Machine (G2PM), a generative Transformer pre-training framework for graphs. G2PM represents graph instances (nodes, edges, or entire graphs) as sequences of substructures, and employs generative pre-training over the sequences to learn generalizable and transferable representations. Empirically, G2PM demonstrates strong scalability: on the ogbn-arxivbenchmark, it continues to improve with model sizes up to 60M parameters, outperforming prior generative approaches that plateau at significantly smaller scales (e.g., 3M). In addition, we systematically analyze the model design space, highlighting key architectural choices that contribute to its scalability and generalization. Across diverse tasks--including node/link/graph classification, transfer learning, and crossgraph pretraining--G2PM consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing a compelling foundation for scalable graph learning.
Horizon Reduction Makes RLScalable
In this work, we study the scalability of offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In principle, a truly scalable offline RL algorithm should be able to solve any given problem, regardless of its complexity, given sufficient data, compute, and model capacity. We investigate if and how current offline RL algorithms match up to this promise on diverse, challenging, previously unsolved tasks, using datasets up to 1000 larger than typical offline RL datasets. We observe that despite scaling up data, many existing offline RL algorithms exhibit poor scaling behavior, saturating well below the maximum performance. We hypothesize that the horizon is the main cause behind the poor scaling of offline RL. We empirically verify this hypothesis through several analysis experiments, showing that long horizons indeed present a fundamental barrier to scaling up offline RL. We then show that various horizon reduction1 techniques substantially enhance scalability on challenging tasks. Based on our insights, we also introduce a minimal yet scalable method named SHARSA that effectively reduces the horizon. SHARSA achieves the best asymptotic performance and scaling behavior among our evaluation methods, showing that explicitly reducing the horizon unlocks the scalability of offline RL.
PLMTrajRec: A Scalable and Generalizable Trajectory Recovery Method with Pre-trained Language Models
Spatiotemporal trajectory data is crucial for various traffic-related applications. However, issues such as device malfunctions and network instability often result in sparse trajectories that lose detailed movement information compared to their dense counterparts. Recovering missing points in sparse trajectories is thus essential. Despite recent progress, three challenges remain. First, the lack of large-scale dense trajectory datasets hinders the training of a trajectory recovery model. Second, the varying spatiotemporal correlations in sparse trajectories make it hard to generalize across different sampling intervals.
CTSketch: Compositional Tensor Sketching for Scalable Neurosymbolic Learning
Many computational tasks benefit from being formulated as the composition of neural networks followed by a discrete symbolic program. The goal of neurosymbolic learning is to train the neural networks using end-to-end input-output labels of the composite. We introduce CTSketch, a novel, scalable neurosymbolic learning algorithm. CTSketch uses two techniques to improve the scalability of neurosymbolic inference: decompose the symbolic program into sub-programs and summarize each sub-program with a sketched tensor. This strategy allows us to approximate the output distribution of the program with simple tensor operations over the input distributions and the sketches. We provide theoretical insight into the maximum approximation error. Furthermore, we evaluate CTSketch on benchmarks from the neurosymbolic learning literature, including some designed for evaluating scalability. Our results show that CTSketch pushes neurosymbolic learning to new scales that were previously unattainable, with neural predictors obtaining high accuracy on tasks with one thousand inputs, despite supervision only on the final output.
Regret Analysis of Average-Reward Unichain MDPs via an Actor-Critic Approach
Actor-Critic methods are widely used for their scalability, yet existing theoretical guarantees for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) often rely on restrictive ergodicity assumptions. We propose NAC-B, a Natural Actor-Critic with Batching, that achieves order-optimal regret of \$\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})\$ in infinite-horizon average-reward MDPs under the unichain assumption, which permits both transient states and periodicity. This assumption is among the weakest under which the classic policy gradient theorem remains valid for average-reward settings. NAC-B employs function approximation for both the actor and the critic, enabling scalability to problems with large state and action spaces. The use of batching in our algorithm helps mitigate potential periodicity in the MDP and reduces stochasticity in gradient estimates, and our analysis formalizes these benefits through the introduction of the constants $C_{\text{hit}}$ and $C_{\text{tar}}$, which characterize the rate at which empirical averages over Markovian samples converge to the stationary distribution.
Generative Graph Pattern Machine
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been predominantly driven by message-passing, where node representations are iteratively updated via local neighborhood aggregation. Despite their success, message-passing suffers from fundamental limitations---including constrained expressiveness, over-smoothing, over-squashing, and limited capacity to model long-range dependencies. These issues hinder scalability: increasing data size or model size often fails to yield improved performance. To this end, we explore pathways beyond message-passing and introduce Generative Graph Pattern Machine (G$^2$PM), a generative Transformer pre-training framework for graphs. G$^2$PM represents graph instances (nodes, edges, or entire graphs) as sequences of substructures, and employs generative pre-training over the sequences to learn generalizable and transferable representations. Empirically, G$^2$PM demonstrates strong scalability: on the ogbn-arxiv benchmark, it continues to improve with model sizes up to 60M parameters, outperforming prior generative approaches that plateau at significantly smaller scales (e.g., 3M). In addition, we systematically analyze the model design space, highlighting key architectural choices that contribute to its scalability and generalization. Across diverse tasks---including node/link/graph classification, transfer learning, and cross-graph pretraining---G$^2$PM consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing a compelling foundation for scalable graph learning.
Scalable inference of functional neural connectivity at submillisecond timescales
The Poisson Generalized Linear Model (GLM) is a foundational tool for analyzing neural spike train data. However, standard implementations rely on discretizing spike times into binned count data, limiting temporal resolution and scalability. Here, we develop stochastic optimization methods and polynomial approximations to the continuous-time analog of these models, and show them to be advantageous over their discrete-time counterparts. Further, we propose using a set of exponentially scaled Laguerre polynomials as an orthogonal temporal basis, which improves filter identification and yields closed-form integral solutions under the polynomial approximation. Applied to both synthetic and real spike-time data from rodent hippocampus, our methods demonstrate superior accuracy and scalability compared to traditional binned GLMs, enabling functional connectivity inference in large-scale neural recordings that are temporally precise on the order of synaptic dynamical timescales. We provide open-source implementations of both MC and PA estimators, optimized for GPU acceleration, to facilitate adoption in the neuroscience community.
Exploring Data Scaling Trends and Effects in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences and values. While recent research has primarily focused on algorithmic advancements--such as reducing computational overhead or strengthening reward models to mitigate reward hacking--the critical role of prompt-data construction and its scalability has received comparatively less attention. In this paper, we address this gap by systematically exploring data-driven bottlenecks that currently hinder RLHF performance scaling, focusing specifically on the challenges posed by reward hacking and decreasing response diversity. To mitigate reward hacking, we introduce a hybrid reward system combining reasoning task verifiers (RTV) and a generative reward model (GenRM). This approach not only exhibits enhanced resistance to reward hacking, but also enables accurate assessment of responses against clearly defined ground-truth solutions. Additionally, in order to ensure response diversity and enhance learning effectiveness, we propose a novel prompt-selection method named \textbf{Pre-PPO}, explicitly identifying training prompts that are inherently challenging and thus less prone to reward hacking.