In this work, we introduce Instella-MoE, a fully open Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 16 billion total parameters and 2.8 billion active parameters per token, trained entirely from scratch on AMD Instinct MI300X and MI325X GPUs. Instella-MoE combines a sparsely activated MoE design with architectural and system-level innovations, including Gated Multi-head Latent Attention (Gated MLA) and FarSkip-Collective connectivity, enabling efficient large-scale training and inference. The model is developed through a multi-stage pipeline comprising pre-training, mid-training, long-context extension, supervised fine-tuning with feedback-driven data curation, direct preference optimization, and reinforcement learning with Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation. Instella-MoE achieves an average score of 76.7 across standard pre-training benchmarks, outperforming prior fully open models including OLMo-3-7B, SmolLM3-3B, and OLMoE-1B-7B, while remaining competitive with open-weight MoE and dense baselines at comparable active-parameter scales, including Moonlight-16B-A3B and Qwen3.5-4B. After post-training, our final Think checkpoint achieves an average score of 73.2 across instruction-following, reasoning, math, coding, and chat benchmarks, outperforming both fully open and open-weight models with comparable or larger active parameter counts in our evaluation. To support transparent and reproducible research, we release the complete Instella-MoE model flow, including model weights, training configurations, data mixtures, and training code. Together, these contributions establish Instella-MoE a strong, fully open foundation for efficient, high-performing MoE models and reproducible research.
Decision tree-based models are widely used in machine learning due to their interpretability and strong empirical performance. However, training decision trees can be computationally expensive, particularly for large and high-dimensional datasets, largely due to the exhaustive search over candidate splits at each node. To improve computational efficiency, we propose Data-Informed Centroid Splitting (DICS), a clustering-based framework that constructs a compact and informative set of candidate splits using data-driven priors. By incorporating class-aware structure, DICS significantly reduces the split search space for classification tasks while preserving predictive performance. We further provide theoretical analysis showing that under the stated assumptions, DICS does not degrade the performance of classification trees compared to exhaustive split search. DICS can be incorporated into classification trees, random forests, and gradient-boosting models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DICS achieves comparable accuracy while substantially reducing training time across synthetic and benchmark datasets, highlighting the benefit of integrating data-informed priors into split selection for scalable classification tree learning.
While generalist VLMs are expensive to train, creating domain experts is widely assumed to require fine-tuning increasingly large foundation models. We show that, in veterinary radiology, this assumption is misguided. By rethinking the entire VLM pipeline - from text tokenisation and pre-training to grounding and inference - we demonstrate that careful engineering can yield models that outperform much larger foundation models from scratch, without relying on any other data. Our approach introduces new strategies for generative pre-training and grounding that improve training efficiency, increasing data utilisation and downstream performance. Using only a fraction of the parameters, data, and compute of contemporary generalist models, we develop the first VLM capable of generating diagnostic reports for veterinary radiographs, surpassing open foundation models on this task by significant margin.
Coreset selection reduces the cost of model training by replacing a large training set with a small representative subset. Existing gradient-approximation coreset methods such as CRAIG and cluster-based variants can preserve model accuracy. Still, their selection stages often rely on dense pairwise distances or large item-cluster bound matrices, leading to high time and memory costs on large datasets. This paper proposes KNNG-CS, a lightweight coreset selection method based on a $K$-nearest neighbor graph. KNNG-CS exploits local neighborhood structures to estimate the importance of each data item and greedily selects representative nodes without maintaining a quadratic distance matrix. The method requires only linear storage in the number of edges. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that KNNG-CS achieves accuracy comparable to representative gradient-approximation coreset methods, while reducing selection time by $2.3\times$-$41.2\times$ and peak memory to $0.3\%$-$7.5\%$ of the baselines.
Training a language model suite classically requires training each model separately and serving them independently. We improve both training and inference efficiency by stacking sub-models of increasing size into a single nested architecture trained end-to-end. This Matryoshka training framework reduces the total parameter count of the suite, enables low-cost distillation from the largest to all smaller sub-models at every training step, and is well-suited for speculative decoding as the draft model is contained within the verifier. We validate our approach by training a Matryoshka suite comprising 500M, 1.5B, and 3B sub-models. Our suite is on par with independently trained baselines on benchmark performance and validation and out-of-domain perplexities, while using 36% less training compute and improving the throughput of speculative decoding by 14-26%. We also ablate key architectural choices, offering guidance for building strong Matryoshka LM suites.
Bakbergen Ryskulov, Iker García-Ferrero, David Montero +5cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG
Small language models are often the only option for deployment under tight latency, cost, and on-premises constraints, but they are rarely trained from scratch: a compressed model is usually recovered through knowledge distillation (KD). This recovery step largely decides the final quality, yet it is expensive. We present a practitioner's study of how to make distillation training efficient, organised around two systems contributions. First, we show that offline KD (caching the teacher's top-$K$ logits once and training the student against the cache) matches online distillation at near-identical training loss while removing the teacher from memory, running about 29\% faster per iteration, and reaching up to 41\% higher throughput on a single H200 GPU. Second, we introduce a \emph{fused, chunked KL loss} that never materialises the full vocabulary-sized logit tensor, making peak memory linear in the sequence length. This removes the memory spike that otherwise caps context length and lets us train at four times the context (32{,}768 tokens) on a single GPU. A separate output-head-only toy benchmark isolates the loss kernel and confirms its memory and iteration-rate scaling from 4K to 256K tokens. Together these make large-scale healing and hundreds of ablations affordable. We also report supporting ablations on loss design and sequence packing. We release our chunked-loss implementation: https://github.com/CompactifAI/Full-Chunked-KL-Loss.
Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for solving partial differential equations (PDEs) by embedding governing physical laws into deep neural networks. However, their reliance on computationally expensive gradient-based optimization and deep architectures often results in slow training, high computational cost, and limited scalability. In this work, we propose a novel physics-informed broad learning system (PI-BLS), the first physics-informed learning framework based on broad RdNNs. The proposed formulation embeds the governing differential operator and the associated initial and boundary constraints directly into a linear output-layer optimization problem, thereby replacing nonlinear gradient-based training with a deterministic least-squares solution obtained via the pseudoinverse. Consequently, the entire learning process is reduced to a single linear optimization stage while preserving the underlying physical constraints. As a result, PI-BLS offers an efficient learning paradigm for a physics-informed learning framework for solving PDEs that eliminates iterative backpropagation while preserving the underlying physical constraints. Experimental results on representative forward PDE benchmarks demonstrate that PI-BLS achieves competitive and often superior performance with reduced training time and model parameters compared with conventional PINNs.
Weiming Zhuang, Jiabo Huang, Jingtao Li +4cs.CV cs.AI
Unifying visual understanding and generation in one model holds immense promise, but remains challenging and expensive due to heavy compute and data demands and conflicts between the visual features needed for these two capabilities. To address these challenges, we present Argus-Unified, a compact, effective and unified multimodal model built with low demand on computation and data. Instead of aligning modalities from scratch, Argus-Unified effectively leverages pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) that provide strong multimodal priors. Specifically, we introduce hybrid visual tokens that preserve continuous tokens for understanding while learning discrete tokens for generation from a frozen unified vision encoder. Our training pipeline includes two stages: the first stage learns a quantizer and image decoder on top of the frozen vision encoder, the second stage trains the LLM initialized from a pretrained VLM for the unified multimodal modeling. Using by far the least amount of data (15.6M) and the lowest cost (~$2,000), we demonstrate that unified multimodal models can be trained economically while achieving strong performance in both understanding and generation. Notably, our model attains state-of-the-art multimodal understanding on GQA, POPE, and VQAv2, and competitive generation quality compared to models with dedicated vision encoders (e.g., Janus, Janus-Pro), all at ~10x lower cost and with ~5x less data. We envision Argus-Unified as a useful baseline that lowers the development barrier for unified models.
State-space sequence models are attractive for streaming speech because they maintain compact recurrent state, but scan-style training kernels can have unfavorable constants for short audio tasks. We study cumsum-composable phase transport, a streaming-native temporal layer for keyword spotting. Each layer projects acoustic frames to complex channels, transports them by learned unitary rotations, accumulates a finite window using prefix differences, and applies a gated residual update. The same prefix representation gives exact batched training with ordinary cumulative sums and exact online inference with one prefix update per frame. Unitary transport is the key constraint: inverse rotations have norm one, keeping prefix terms well conditioned while memory is supplied by windows or block readouts. On Google Speech Commands v2 with 12 labels, mel+cumsum models retain competitive accuracy with compact baselines. The strongest single-seed run reaches 97.3\% test accuracy; a 51.6K-parameter tied model also reaches 97.3\%, and a 24.8K tied model reaches 96.8\% versus 97.1\% for a 25.6K MelCNNMaxPool baseline. In a matched cumsum-versus-scan benchmark, cumsum+window gives comparable accuracy, 94.82\% versus 94.33\%, while training 1.07x faster and reducing single-example latency from 7.09 ms to 5.01 ms on a Tesla T4. These results support cumsum phase transport as a simple low-cost temporal primitive for streaming keyword spotting.
Vector Quantization (VQ) underpins modern discrete visual tokenization. However, training quantization modules for state-of-the-art VQ-based models requires significant computational resources which, in practice, all but prevents the development of novel, cutting-edge VQ techniques under resource constraints. To address this limitation, we propose {\bf VQ-Transplant}, a simple framework that enables plug-and-play integration of new VQ modules into frozen, pre-trained tokenizers by replacing their native VQ modules. Crucially, the proposed transplantation process preserves all encoder-decoder parameters, obviating the need for costly end-to-end retraining when modifying the quantization method. To mitigate decoder-quantization mismatch, we introduce a lightweight decoder adaptation strategy (trained for only 5 epochs on ImageNet-1k) to align feature priors with the new quantization space. In our empirical evaluation, we find that VQ-Transplant allows obtaining near state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity for industry-level models like VAR while reducing the training cost by 95\%. VQ-Transplant democratizes quantization research by enabling resource-efficient integration of novel VQ techniques while matching industry-level reconstruction performance.
We present the Loopie series, consisting of two Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models: a 20B-parameter model with 2B active parameters and a 6B-parameter model with 0.6B active parameters. Looped Transformers have long faced a challenge: given an N times increase in pre-training compute, increasing the parameter count by a factor of N usually outperforms looping a model N times. Loopie addresses this challenge. Extensive ablation studies, including comparisons with a vanilla 30B-A3B model, show that Loopie substantially outperforms vanilla Transformer baselines trained with the same compute budget. With a novel post-training method, Loopie develops strong reasoning abilities and achieves frontier-level reasoning performance.
Rémy Chapelle, Nicolas Vayatis, Bruno Falissard +1stat.ML cs.LG
Boosting is one of the most successful learning techniques for standard classification and regression tasks. Its extension to multi-output prediction problems has found an increasing number of applications in recent years. Among them is the prediction of entire conditional distributions rather than single functionals, which can often be framed as a multi-output regression problem, for example multiple quantile regression. Addressing such problems with classical implementations of boosting is computationally challenging, because usually one base model is trained for each target at every iteration. More efficient variants of boosting have been proposed to speed up training, but they tend to be tied to specific loss functions and classes of base learners, usually decision trees. In this work, we study a modification of the gradient boosting algorithm, which we call parallel gradient boosting, designed to circumvent all these limitations. The core idea is to use a common descent direction for all training observations. By doing so, only one base model is needed at each iteration, regardless of the number of targets, which allows for considerable performance gains. We establish sufficient conditions for the convergence of the algorithm, whose practical use is introduced via the multiple quantile regression setting. We show that in such a setting, it provides predictions of similar quality to state-of-the-art boosting libraries such as XGBoost, while being faster by several orders of magnitude. Then, we evaluate the properties of the resulting conditional distribution estimator, which is shown empirically to outperform other nonparametric and semiparametric estimators, especially in high-dimensional settings and in the presence of mixed and/or missing covariates.
Current safety methods for large language models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, motivating research into robust alternatives. Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) is among the most effective defenses, but can degrade utility and requires training on large datasets of harmful prompts. We introduce Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), which replaces explicit harm refusal with adversarial training on just 66 harm-agnostic statements drawn from psychometric personality literature. We hypothesize that personality-anchored representations share latent structure with harm avoidance, so adversarially stabilizing them implicitly constrains the subspace exploited by jailbreak attacks. LPA achieves near-zero attack success rates on HarmBench across direct requests and five jailbreak methods, despite never seeing harmful content during training and no loss of performance on standard benchmarks. Moreover, the training process is lightweight; the entire procedure completes in minutes on a single GPU and uses 75x fewer examples than standard LAT. Extensive ablations demonstrate the robustness, efficiency, and generalization of our method.
Xiaolong Huang, Benjamin Thérien, James Harrison +1cs.LG
Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e.g., Adam and Muon) by meta-learning small neural network optimizers over a distribution of tasks. While recent work has greatly advanced the architectural design and inductive biases of learned optimizers (LOs), their meta-training remains biased toward short-unroll learning on particular tasks, resulting in redundant computation and leaving LOs often unable to compete with hand-designed optimizers. We introduce Efficient Long-hOrizon (ELO) learning, an efficient meta-training algorithm that (1) reallocates wasted meta-training compute to longer failure regimes, achieving efficient long-horizon learning, and (2) enforces decoupled progressive expert supervision, providing stable meta-learning signals that additionally improve the generalization of LOs. Our empirical study evaluates ELO for meta-training both element-wise and matrix-based LOs. Across downstream language modeling (GPT-2-124M/350M on FineWeb) and image classification (ViT-B/16, ResNet-50 on ImageNet-1K) tasks, ELO substantially improves the long-unroll performance and out-of-distribution generalization of the base LOs. In particular, ELO-Celo2 consistently outperforms well-tuned AdamW across all evaluated tasks, while remaining competitive with Muon on language modeling. \textit{Notably, all ELO baselines require less than 7 H100 GPU-hours for meta-training.}
Mohamed Anwar, Abed Alhakim Freihat, George Ibrahim +57cs.CL cs.AI
Jais 2 is a family of Arabic-centric large language models developed jointly by MBZUAI, Cerebras, and Inception, designed to advance Arabic-centric language modeling, with strong performance across the Arabic and culturally grounded benchmarks evaluated in this report. The family includes, to our knowledge, the largest open Arabic-centric LLM trained from scratch at 70B parameters, and a competitive 8B-parameter variant among the evaluated open models. A custom Arabic-centric vocabulary enables efficient training and inference. In addition, an optimized architecture and training recipe yield highly compute-efficient training. With a substantially smaller token budget than comparable models, Jais 2 achieves strong Arabic performance on the benchmarks considered in this report and competitive English results. The models obtain leading results among the evaluated open models on OALL2 and AraGen. They also perform strongly on several culturally grounded Arabic benchmarks, including poetry, religion, cuisine, and dream interpretation, as well as in general tasks such as translation and summarization. We release the models in HuggingFace under a commercially permissive license. Jais 2 70B is also released as a chat app on the Web, iOS, and Android; it runs on Cerebras hardware, delivering up to 2,000 tokens per second, and enabling high-throughput Arabic-centric chat serving in our deployment setting. By uniting scale, linguistic diversity, cultural fidelity, openness, and speed, Jais 2 provides an open-weight foundation intended to support further research and development in Arabic-centric LLMs.
We study three complementary techniques for training compute-efficient language models. (1) Selective supervision and per-token efficiency. Selective Ground Truth Token Training (SGT) concentrates supervision on the ~15% of output tokens that carry semantic payload. Through positive gradient coupling in position-shared transformer weights -- a token-level instance of auxiliary-task transfer -- the remaining 85% of unsupervised tokens still improve substantially, giving a 4.5x per-supervised-token efficiency (at the step-100 eval optimum, ~67% of the full-sequence loss reduction is recovered from 15% of the supervision). We prove that this improvement on unsupervised tokens is guaranteed whenever the gradient coupling coefficient gamma-bar = 0.72 is positive (Theorem 1), and show the effect is a property of natural-language structure: it collapses on shuffled text. (2) Depth compression with recurrent recovery. A 48-layer, 1B-parameter transformer is compressed to 6 layers (227M) by averaging adjacent layers and restored through learned recurrent unrolling. With 34 effective recurrent layers it reaches a held-out loss of 2.934, within measurement noise of a 566M dense model at 2.926 -- a 2.5x reduction in parameters. (3) Fusion of compressed experts. Assembling several compressed models as a Mixture of Efficient Experts (MoEE) with multi-token prediction improves over each single expert at comparable active parameters: a 2-expert MoEE reaches loss 2.789 versus 2.926 for the best single compressed model. We validate these techniques on CHERRY-1.8B, a Korean foundation model whose every trainable parameter derives from our own training runs. We are explicit throughout about the scope of the evidence (one model family, Korean data, loss-based metrics) and about which claims are established versus prospective.
Cristiana Diaconu, Jonas Scholz, Aliaksandra Shysheya +4cs.LG cs.CE
State-of-the-art medium-range AI weather models can outperform traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) but require massive training budgets. This restricts usage for under-resourced groups and severely limits fast model iteration. Here we develop Otter Weather, a highly efficient spatiotemporal forecasting model designed to democratise high-performance weather prediction with AI. Evaluated on ERA5 reanalysis data at 1.5° resolution using standard WeatherBench protocols, the Otter family significantly advances the skill-compute Pareto frontier. The deterministic version outperforms the best NWP baseline by 9.6% at a 24-hour lead time while requiring fewer than 3.5 A100-days for training. It provides a 2x efficiency gain over lightweight AI models and a 100-fold reduction in compute compared to resource-intensive frontier architectures. We extend these efficiency gains into probabilistic forecasting by training via the Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS). Scaling to a larger architecture, Otter-XL achieves a 9.7% CRPS improvement over the IFS ENS baseline. This yields an almost two-fold increase in predictive skill over comparable lightweight models at similar compute budgets. Otter-XL also outperforms frontier architectures like GenCast by over 2%, while using an order of magnitude less compute. Finally, Otter is applied out-of-the-box to a complex acoustic scattering PDE task where it outperforms a state-of-the-art foundation modelling approach, suggesting that the advances made here might apply across a range of scientific domains.
Training image generation foundation models consumes substantial resources. Previous methods have attempted to leverage semantic guidance to accelerate the training process, yet their experiments were only conducted on simple datasets such as ImageNet, at low resolutions, and with small-scale models. In this paper, we propose SeFi-Image, a text-to-image foundation model built upon semantic-first diffusion, a novel latent diffusion modeling paradigm. We instantiate SeFi-Image at three model scales, 1B, 2B, and 5B parameters, enabling systematic study of scaling behavior and flexible deployment under varying compute budgets. Notably, our largest 5B model was trained with merely 125K A800 GPU hours, corresponding to roughly 10-20% of the training compute used by Z-Image. However, it achieves results comparable to or even superior to Qwen-Image and Z-Image. Despite this modest training compute, SeFi-Image achieves strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, including GenEval, DPG, LongTextBench, OneIG, and CVTG-2K. Moreover, we provide DMD2-distilled few-step turbo variants for each model scale to accommodate diverse hardware constraints and latency requirements. We publicly release our code, weights and hope this work offers the community useful insights into semantic-guided diffusion modeling for T2I generation, while also providing practical and readily deployable model options.
Daniel Vila-Cruz, Laura Morán-Fernández, Verónica Bolón-Canedocs.LG cs.AI cs.CV
Deep learning models achieve state-of-the-art image classification but face deployment challenges due to computational costs and energy demands. We propose a lightweight training strategy that adapts normalization layers of the model to the new domain and decouples feature extraction from classifier optimization, reducing overhead by precomputing features only once. A redesigned classifier head with margin-based weighted loss further minimizes ambiguity without end-to-end backpropagation. Evaluated across four CNN architectures (ResNet18, ResNet50, MobileNet, DenseNet121), three Transformer models (ViT, Swin and DeiT) and three medical datasets (Brain Cancer MRI, BreakHis and PatchCamelyon), our approach significantly reduces the required training time with only a marginal accuracy trade-off, often matching or surpassing baseline performance. This efficiency translates to reducing CO2 by orders of magnitude, offering a practical and environmentally sustainable solution for resource-constrained clinical or prototyping environments.
Daniel Vila-Cruz, Laura Morán-Fernández, Verónica Bolón-Canedocs.LG cs.AI
We present HydraCIL, a decoupled continual learning model based on prototype-guided multi-head classifiers, targeting sustainable deployment in embedded and resource-constrained environments. While most Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) methods rely on powerful hardware and long retraining cycles, real-world systems, such as robots or edge AI devices, must adapt quickly with limited resources. HydraCIL addresses this gap by freezing the backbone and decoupling feature extraction from learning. For each task, features are extracted once and a lightweight, task-specific classifier head is created, avoiding costly backbone retraining. At inference, HydraCIL selects the appropriate head via similarity with prototypes. Experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-100, CoRe50, and Flowers102 datasets show that HydraCIL matches or outperforms state-of-the-art CIL methods while significantly reducing training time and carbon footprint, making it a practical solution for continual learning in real-world and embedded settings, where energy efficiency and rapid adaptation are critical.
Multi-modal approaches used for 3D CAD generation require substantial computational resources, necessitating efficient training. To address this, we propose GuideCAD, which leverages semantically rich visual-textual representations having only a small number of trainable parameters to generate 3D CAD models. Specifically, GuideCAD uses a mapping network that converts image embeddings into prefix embeddings, enabling a pretrained large language model to integrate visual and textual information. As a result, a transformer-based decoder predicts the construction sequence using the visual-textual embeddings in order to generate the 3D CAD model. For experimental evaluation, we construct a new dataset, referred to as GuideCAD, which consists of text-image pairs. Each pair includes a text prompt that represents a 3D CAD construction sequence and its corresponding 3D CAD image. Our experimental results show that GuideCAD generates comparably high-quality 3D CAD models while using approximately four times fewer parameters and achieving twice the training efficiency compared to fine-tuning approaches. We have released the source code and dataset for our method at: https://github.com/mskimS2/GuideCAD
Heng Zhao, Zilei Shao, Guy Van den Broeck +1cs.LG cs.AI
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale by activating only a small subset of experts per token. However, training such models remains challenging because top-$k$ routing is discrete and non-differentiable, requiring gradient estimators for expert selection whose design remains a central open problem. We introduce ProbMoE, a probabilistic routing framework that models expert selection as a distribution over cardinality-constrained expert subsets and formulates routing as probabilistic inference in this discrete subset space. We first propose ProbMoE Exact-$k$ routing, which samples $k$-expert subsets in the forward pass, and the backward pass uses gradients through each expert's exact marginal probability as a tractable surrogate for the true gradient. ProbMoE naturally generalizes to a dynamic-$k$ routing setting, where both training and inference constrain the routing cardinality to the same predefined range, allowing adaptive expert allocation per token. Across benchmarks and model backbones, ProbMoE Exact-$k$ achieves strong performance compared to competitive baselines, with improved expert utilization and routing diversity; ProbMoE Dynamic-$k$ achieves comparable performance with fewer activated experts.
Mingliang Liang, Zhuoran Liu, Arjen P. de Vries +1cs.CV
The computational cost of training a vision-language model (VLM) can be reduced by sampling the training data. Previous work on efficient VLM pre-training has pointed to the importance of semantic data balance, adjusting the distribution of topics in the data to improve VLM accuracy. However, existing efficient pre-training approaches may disproportionately remove rare concepts from the training corpus. As a result, \emph{long-tail concepts} remain insufficiently represented in the training data and are not effectively captured during training. In this work, we introduce a \emph{dynamic cluster-based sampling approach (DynamiCS)} that downsamples large clusters of data and upsamples small ones. The approach is dynamic in that it applies sampling at each epoch. We first show the importance of dynamic sampling for VLM training. Then, we demonstrate the advantage of our cluster-scaling approach, which maintains the relative order of semantic clusters in the data and emphasizes the long-tail. This approach contrasts with current work, which focuses only on flattening the semantic distribution of the data. Our experiments show that DynamiCS reduces the computational cost of VLM training and provides a performance advantage for long-tail concepts.