new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Aug 14

The Base Dependent Behavior of Kaprekar's Routine: A Theoretical and Computational Study Revealing New Regularities

Consider the following process: Take any four-digit number which has at least two distinct digits. Then, rearrange the digits of the original number in ascending and descending order, take these two numbers, and find the difference between the two. Finally, repeat this routine using the difference as the new four-digit number. In 1949, D. R. Kaprekar became the first to discover that this process, known as the Kaprekar Routine, would always yield 6174 within 7 iterations. Since this number remains unchanged after an application of the Kaprekar Routine, it became known as Kaprekar's Constant. Previous works have shown that the only base 10 Kaprekar's Constants are 495 and 6174, the 3-digit and 4-digit case. However, little attention has been given to other bases or determining which digit cases and which bases have a Kaprekar's Constant. This paper analyzes the behavior of the Kaprekar Routine in the 3-digit case, deriving an expression for all 3-digit Kaprekar Constants. In addition, the author developed a series of C++ programs to analyze the paths integers followed to their respective Kaprekar's Constant. Surprisingly, it was determined from this program that the most commonly required number of iterations required to reach Kaprekar's Constant for 3-digit integers was consistently 3, regardless of base. When loaded as a matrix, the iteration requirement data demonstrates a precise recurring relationship reminiscent of Pascal's Triangle.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 16, 2017

A Triadic Suffix Tokenization Scheme for Numerical Reasoning

Standard subword tokenization methods fragment numbers inconsistently, causing large language models (LLMs) to lose positional and decimal structure - a primary driver of errors in arithmetic and scientific reasoning. We introduce Triadic Suffix Tokenization (TST), a deterministic scheme that partitions digits into three-digit triads and annotates each triad with an explicit magnitude marker. Critically, the scheme defines a fixed, one-to-one mapping between suffixes and orders of magnitude for the integer part (thousands, millions, billions, etc.) and a parallel system of replicated markers for fractional depth (tenths, thousandths, millionths, etc.). Unlike approaches that rely on positional inference, this method provides a consistent gradient signal, which should ensure stable convergence. Two implementation variants are proposed: (1) a vocabulary-based approach that adds at most 10,000 fixed tokens to an existing vocabulary, covering 33 orders of magnitude (10^{-15} to 10^{18}); and (2) a suffix-marker approach that uses a small set of special tokens to denote magnitude dynamically. Both variants preserve exact digits while making order-of-magnitude relationships transparent at the token level. The framework is inherently scalable, allowing for linear vocabulary expansion to accommodate arbitrary precision and range. TST is architecture-agnostic and can be integrated as a drop-in preprocessing step. Experimental validation is deferred to future work.

  • 1 authors
·
Apr 12 1

Direction-Preserving Number Representations

Low-precision number formats are widely used in modern machine learning systems due to their efficiency. Accurate direction representation is key to the accuracy of vector operations. This work precisely explores the extent to which the direction of a vector can be represented by selecting its scalar elements from a common finite alphabet of a given size. This is standard practice in machine learning, where low-precision significands may be narrow-width floating-point or integer values. A geometric framework is introduced for analyzing the directional coverage of such product-structured codes. This work analytically quantifies the suboptimality gap between such product-structured codes and spherical codes for the vector as a whole, in both low and asymptotically high dimensions. Furthermore, within the product code class, it is proven that the standard formats of two's complement, fixed-point, and floating-point are suboptimal, again with quantified gap, pointing to the potential to develop new scalar number formats. Such scalar alphabets are numerically optimized across multiple block dimensions for directional coverage, including the dimension used in NVIDIA's NVFP4 format. Experimental results are presented comparing the performance of standard formats and the optimized alphabet. We find that for four bits, NVIDIA's choice of E2M1 closely approximates the optimized alphabet, providing a geometric explanation for its strong performance in low-precision machine learning workloads and an analytical understanding of the link between that superiority and block size. We provide open-source formal proofs in Lean for the theorems in this work, along with the experimental code and the optimized alphabets obtained.

  • 2 authors
·
May 7

Synthesis of 3D on-air signatures with the Sigma-Lognormal model

Signature synthesis is a computation technique that generates artificial specimens which can support decision making in automatic signature verification. A lot of work has been dedicated to this subject, which centres on synthesizing dynamic and static two-dimensional handwriting on canvas. This paper proposes a framework to generate synthetic 3D on-air signatures exploiting the lognormality principle, which mimics the complex neuromotor control processes at play as the fingertip moves. Addressing the usual cases involving the development of artificial individuals and duplicated samples, this paper contributes to the synthesis of: (1) the trajectory and velocity of entirely 3D new signatures; (2) kinematic information when only the 3D trajectory of the signature is known, and (3) duplicate samples of 3D real signatures. Validation was conducted by generating synthetic 3D signature databases mimicking real ones and showing that automatic signature verifications of genuine and skilled forgeries report performances similar to those of real and synthetic databases. We also observed that training 3D automatic signature verifiers with duplicates can reduce errors. We further demonstrated that our proposal is also valid for synthesizing 3D air writing and gestures. Finally, a perception test confirmed the human likeness of the generated specimens. The databases generated are publicly available, only for research purposes, at .

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 29, 2024

The Right Answer, the Wrong Direction: Why Transformers Fail at Counting and How to Fix It

Large language models often fail at simple counting tasks, even when the items to count are explicitly present in the prompt. We investigate whether this failure occurs because transformers do not represent counts internally, or because they cannot convert those representations into the correct output tokens. Across three model families, Pythia, Qwen3, and Mistral, ranging from 0.4B to 14B parameters, we find strong evidence for the second explanation. Linear probes recover the correct count from intermediate layers with near-perfect accuracy (R^2>0.99), showing that the information is present. However, the internal directions that encode counts are nearly orthogonal to the output-head rows for digit tokens (|cos|leq0.032). In other words, the model stores the count in a form that the digit logits do not naturally read out. We localize this failure with two interventions. Updating only the digit rows of the output head (36,864 parameters) substantially improves constrained next-token digit prediction (60.7 to 100.0% across four tasks), but it does not fix autoregressive generation. By contrast, a small LoRA intervention on attention Q/V weights (7.67M parameters) improves upstream routing and achieves 83.1% +/- 7.2% in true greedy autoregressive generation. Logit-lens measurements confirm the mechanism: the correct digit's vocabulary rank drops from 55,980 to 1, a 50,000x improvement. Additional norm, logit-lens, and cross-task analyses show that the bottleneck generalizes across character counting, addition, and list length, while remaining absent from broader multi-step reasoning benchmarks, including MMLU, GSM8K, and DROP. These results identify counting failure as a geometric readout bottleneck rather than a failure of internal representation: the model knows the count but the output pathway is geometrically misaligned with the tokens needed to express it.

  • 1 authors
·
May 4

Step-3 is Large yet Affordable: Model-system Co-design for Cost-effective Decoding

Large language models (LLMs) face low hardware efficiency during decoding, especially for long-context reasoning tasks. This paper introduces Step-3, a 321B-parameter VLM with hardware-aware model-system co-design optimized for minimizing decoding costs. Step-3 innovates in two key dimensions: (1) A novel Multi-Matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) mechanism that significantly reduces both KV cache size and computation while maintaining high attention expressiveness, and (2) Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD), a distributed inference system that decouples attention and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) layers into specialized subsystems. This co-design achieves unprecedented cost efficiency: Step-3 significantly reduces theoretical decoding costs compared with models like DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B, with the gains widening at longer context. Step-3 achieves low cost while activating 38B parameters per token (more than DeepSeek-V3 and Qwen3 MoE 235B), demonstrating that hardware-aligned attention arithmetic intensity, MoE sparsity, and AFD are critical to cost-effectiveness. We perform a head-to-head comparison with DeepSeek-V3 in its favorable scenarios. Our implementation on Hopper GPUs achieves a decoding throughput of up to 4,039 tokens per second per GPU under 50ms TPOT SLA (4K context, FP8, no MTP). It is higher than DeepSeek-V3's 2,324 in the same setup and sets a new Pareto frontier for LLM decoding.

  • 199 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025 2

Positional Description Matters for Transformers Arithmetic

Transformers, central to the successes in modern Natural Language Processing, often falter on arithmetic tasks despite their vast capabilities --which paradoxically include remarkable coding abilities. We observe that a crucial challenge is their naive reliance on positional information to solve arithmetic problems with a small number of digits, leading to poor performance on larger numbers. Herein, we delve deeper into the role of positional encoding, and propose several ways to fix the issue, either by modifying the positional encoding directly, or by modifying the representation of the arithmetic task to leverage standard positional encoding differently. We investigate the value of these modifications for three tasks: (i) classical multiplication, (ii) length extrapolation in addition, and (iii) addition in natural language context. For (i) we train a small model on a small dataset (100M parameters and 300k samples) with remarkable aptitude in (direct, no scratchpad) 15 digits multiplication and essentially perfect up to 12 digits, while usual training in this context would give a model failing at 4 digits multiplication. In the experiments on addition, we use a mere 120k samples to demonstrate: for (ii) extrapolation from 10 digits to testing on 12 digits numbers while usual training would have no extrapolation, and for (iii) almost perfect accuracy up to 5 digits while usual training would be correct only up to 3 digits (which is essentially memorization with a training set of 120k samples).

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 21, 2023

VectraYX-Vision-1B: A Sub-2B Spanish/LATAM Cybersecurity Vision-Language Model with Structured Visual Reasoning and Native Tool Use

We present VectraYX-Vision-1B, a sub-2B vision-language model (VLM) for Spanish/LATAM cybersecurity imagery, coupling a frozen SigLIP-so400m encoder to a 1.04B Spanish/LATAM security decoder via an MLP. To our knowledge, it is the first sub-2B VLM specialized for cyber UI (IDA, Ghidra, Wireshark, Nmap, Metasploit, Volatility) that answers in Spanish, emits structured reasoning via native <|think|> tokens, invokes tools via Model Context Protocol (<|tool_call|>), and exports to llama.cpp's LLaVA mmproj format for air-gapped deployment. We report a negative preliminary visual-grounding result: despite fully functional pipelines, the current vision SFT (400-1900 steps, ~16M tokens) yields near-zero B6 scores (0.08 tool-identification), ignoring image content. We specify remediation (longer SFT, >=60% replay, lower LR) and expose a checkpoint-loader bug (unstripped llm. prefix) masquerading as training collapse. Crucially, we introduce a 3-variant ablation matrix (V0: NoPE-every-4, V1: all-RoPE, V2: NoPE+learned 2D) to study if periodic no-positional-encoding (NoPE) layers help or hurt attention over the 729-token visual block. Code, configs, and weights are released to establish priority on this architectural question. We provide B1-B5 for the text backbone, text controls, preliminary B6/B7 scores, wall times, GGUF efficiency on CPU, and a corpus of 14,596 QA pairs across 10 domains. We open-source all models and trajectories: jsantillana/vectrayx-1b, jsantillana/vectrayx-vision-1b, and jsantillana/vectrayx-vision-1b-checks.

  • 1 authors
·
Aug 8 2

HAWQV3: Dyadic Neural Network Quantization

Current low-precision quantization algorithms often have the hidden cost of conversion back and forth from floating point to quantized integer values. This hidden cost limits the latency improvement realized by quantizing Neural Networks. To address this, we present HAWQV3, a novel mixed-precision integer-only quantization framework. The contributions of HAWQV3 are the following: (i) An integer-only inference where the entire computational graph is performed only with integer multiplication, addition, and bit shifting, without any floating point operations or even integer division; (ii) A novel hardware-aware mixed-precision quantization method where the bit-precision is calculated by solving an integer linear programming problem that balances the trade-off between model perturbation and other constraints, e.g., memory footprint and latency; (iii) Direct hardware deployment and open source contribution for 4-bit uniform/mixed-precision quantization in TVM, achieving an average speed up of 1.45times for uniform 4-bit, as compared to uniform 8-bit for ResNet50 on T4 GPUs; and (iv) extensive evaluation of the proposed methods on ResNet18/50 and InceptionV3, for various model compression levels with/without mixed precision. For ResNet50, our INT8 quantization achieves an accuracy of 77.58%, which is 2.68% higher than prior integer-only work, and our mixed-precision INT4/8 quantization can reduce INT8 latency by 23% and still achieve 76.73% accuracy. Our framework and the TVM implementation have been open sourced.

  • 11 authors
·
Nov 20, 2020

Multiplication in Multimodal LLMs: Computation with Text, Image, and Audio Inputs

Multimodal LLMs can accurately perceive numerical content across modalities yet fail to perform exact multi-digit multiplication when the identical underlying arithmetic problem is presented as numerals, number words, images, or in audio form. Because existing benchmarks often lack systematically paired instances across modalities, it remains difficult to compare genuine arithmetic limits within and across model families. We therefore introduce a controlled multimodal multiplication benchmark that factorially varies digit length, digit sparsity, representation (e.g., numerals vs. number words), and modality (text, rendered images, audio), with paired instances from a reproducible generator. We also define arithmetic load, C, as the product of the total and non-zero digit count as a compact, mechanistically motivated proxy for operation count. Across evaluations, accuracy falls sharply as C grows, often nearing zero by C > 100. Indeed, C remains predictive of performance across modalities and models, with R-squared often > 0.5, nearing the value from more complex measures of arithmetic load that count the number of intermediate arithmetic steps. A separate perception-versus-computation decomposition shows that multimodal degradation is primarily computational rather than perceptual: on matched-perception checks, models are near-perfect (> 99%) across modalities, even when multiplication accuracy drops. Beyond measuring when models fail, we ask which procedures they are predisposed to follow. We introduce a forced-completion loss probe that scores heuristic-specific reasoning prefixes--including columnar multiplication, distributive decomposition, and rounding/compensation. Here, decomposition is favored in both text and vision modalities; heuristic-specific LoRA adapters produce near-orthogonal updates yet degrade accuracy, indicating the base model maintains a well-tuned internal router.

JerzakLabs Jerzak Labs
·
Apr 19 2