Daily Papers

Computational materials discovery is limited by the high cost of first-principles calculations. Machine learning (ML) potentials that predict energies from crystal structures are promising, but existing methods face computational bottlenecks. Steerable graph neural networks (GNNs) encode geometry with spherical harmonics, respecting atomic symmetries -- permutation, rotation, and translation -- for physically realistic predictions. Yet maintaining equivariance is difficult: activation functions must be modified, and each layer must handle multiple data types for different harmonic orders. We present Facet, a GNN architecture for efficient ML potentials, developed through systematic analysis of steerable GNNs. Our innovations include replacing expensive multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) for interatomic distances with splines, which match performance while cutting computational and memory demands. We also introduce a general-purpose equivariant layer that mixes node information via spherical grid projection followed by standard MLPs -- faster than tensor products and more expressive than linear or gate layers. On the MPTrj dataset, Facet matches leading models with far fewer parameters and under 10% of their training compute. On a crystal relaxation task, it runs twice as fast as MACE models. We further show SevenNet-0's parameters can be reduced by over 25% with no accuracy loss. These techniques enable more than 10x faster training of large-scale foundation models for ML potentials, potentially reshaping computational materials discovery.

The application of mixture-of-experts (MoE) is gaining popularity due to its ability to improve model's performance. In an MoE structure, the gate layer plays a significant role in distinguishing and routing input features to different experts. This enables each expert to specialize in processing their corresponding sub-tasks. However, the gate's routing mechanism also gives rise to narrow vision: the individual MoE's expert fails to use more samples in learning the allocated sub-task, which in turn limits the MoE to further improve its generalization ability. To effectively address this, we propose a method called Mixture-of-Distilled-Expert (MoDE), which applies moderate mutual distillation among experts to enable each expert to pick up more features learned by other experts and gain more accurate perceptions on their original allocated sub-tasks. We conduct plenty experiments including tabular, NLP and CV datasets, which shows MoDE's effectiveness, universality and robustness. Furthermore, we develop a parallel study through innovatively constructing "expert probing", to experimentally prove why MoDE works: moderate distilling knowledge can improve each individual expert's test performances on their assigned tasks, leading to MoE's overall performance improvement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across various tasks, and their application in edge scenarios has attracted significant attention. However, sparse-activated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models, which are well suited for edge scenarios, have received relatively little attention due to their high memory demands. Offload-based methods have been proposed to address this challenge, but they face difficulties with expert prediction. Inaccurate expert predictions can result in prolonged inference delays. To promote the application of MoE models in edge scenarios, we propose Fate, an offloading system designed for MoE models to enable efficient inference in resource-constrained environments. The key insight behind Fate is that gate inputs from adjacent layers can be effectively used for expert prefetching, achieving high prediction accuracy without additional GPU overhead. Furthermore, Fate employs a shallow-favoring expert caching strategy that increases the expert hit rate to 99\%. Additionally, Fate integrates tailored quantization strategies for cache optimization and IO efficiency. Experimental results show that, compared to Load on Demand and Expert Activation Path-based method, Fate achieves up to 4.5x and 1.9x speedups in prefill speed and up to 4.1x and 2.2x speedups in decoding speed, respectively, while maintaining inference quality. Moreover, Fate's performance improvements are scalable across different memory budgets.

This paper localizes the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate and amplifier are single heads; at larger scale they become bands of heads across adjacent layers. The gate contributes under 1% of output DLA, but interchange testing (p<0.001) and knockout cascade confirm it is causally necessary. Interchange screening at n>=120 detects the same motif in twelve models from six labs (2B to 72B), though specific heads differ by lab. Per-head ablation weakens up to 58x at 72B and misses gates that interchange identifies; interchange is the only reliable audit at scale. Modulating the detection-layer signal continuously controls policy from hard refusal through evasion to factual answering. On safety prompts the same intervention turns refusal into harmful guidance, showing the safety-trained capability is gated by routing rather than removed. Thresholds vary by topic and by input language, and the circuit relocates across generations within a family while behavioral benchmarks register no change. Routing is early-commitment: the gate commits at its own layer before deeper layers finish processing the input. Under an in-context substitution cipher, gate interchange necessity collapses 70 to 99% across three models and the model switches to puzzle-solving. Injecting the plaintext gate activation into the cipher forward pass restores 48% of refusals in Phi-4-mini, localizing the bypass to the routing interface. A second method, cipher contrast analysis, uses plain/cipher DLA differences to map the full cipher-sensitive routing circuit in O(3n) forward passes. Any encoding that defeats detection-layer pattern matching bypasses the policy regardless of whether deeper layers reconstruct the content.

The discovery of van der Waals magnets has established a new domain in the field of magnetism, opening novel pathways for the electrical control of magnetic properties. In this context, Fe3GeTe2 (FGT) emerges as an exemplary candidate owing to its intrinsic metallic properties, which facilitate the interplay of both charge and spin degrees of freedom. Here, the bidirectional voltage control of exchange bias (EB) effect in a perpendicularly magnetized all-van der Waals FGT/O-FGT/hBN heterostructure is demonstrated. The antiferromagnetic O-FGT layer is formed by naturally oxidizing the FGT surface. The observed EB magnitude reaches 1.4 kOe with a blocking temperature (150 K) reaching close to the Curie temperature of FGT. Both the exchange field and the blocking temperature values are among the highest in the context of layered materials. The EB modulation exhibits a linear dependence on the gate voltage and its polarity, observable in both positive and negative field cooling (FC) experiments. Additionally, gate voltage-controlled magnetization switching, highlighting the potential of FGT-based heterostructures is demonstrated in advanced spintronic devices. These findings display a methodology to modulate the magnetism of van der Waals magnets offering new avenues for the development of high-performance magnetic devices.

We introduce GateSkip, a simple residual-stream gating mechanism that enables token-wise layer skipping in decoder-only LMs. Each Attention/MLP branch is equipped with a sigmoid-linear gate that condenses the branch's output before it re-enters the residual stream. During inference we rank tokens by the gate values and skip low-importance ones using a per-layer budget. While early-exit or router-based Mixture-of-Depths models are known to be unstable and need extensive retraining, our smooth, differentiable gates fine-tune stably on top of pretrained models. On long-form reasoning, we save up to 15\% compute while retaining over 90\% of baseline accuracy. On instruction-tuned models we see accuracy gains at full compute and match baseline quality near 50\% savings. The learned gates give insight into transformer information flow (e.g., BOS tokens act as anchors), and the method combines easily with quantization, pruning, and self-speculative decoding.

Many self-attention sublayers in large language models (LLMs) can be removed with little to no loss. We attribute this to the Attention Suppression Hypothesis: during pre-training, some deep attention layers learn to mute their own contribution, leaving the residual stream and the MLP to carry the representation. We propose Gate-Norm, a one-shot, weight-only criterion that ranks attention sublayers by query--key coupling and removes the least coupled ones, requiring no calibration data, no forward passes, no fine-tuning, and no specialized kernels. On 40-layer, 13B-parameter LLaMA models, Gate-Norm prunes the model in under a second. Pruning 8--16 attention sublayers yields up to 1.30times higher inference throughput while keeping average zero-shot accuracy within 2% of the unpruned baseline across BoolQ, RTE, HellaSwag, WinoGrande, ARC-Easy/Challenge, and OpenBookQA. Across these settings, Gate-Norm matches data-driven pruning methods in accuracy while being sim 1000times faster to score layers, enabling practical, data-free compression of LLMs.

Accurate Vehicle Trajectory Prediction is critical for automated vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems. Vehicle trajectory prediction consists of two essential tasks, i.e., longitudinal position prediction and lateral position prediction. There is a significant correlation between driving intentions and vehicle motion. In existing work, the three tasks are often conducted separately without considering the relationships between the longitudinal position, lateral position, and driving intention. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Multi-Gate Mixture-of-Experts (TMMOE) model for simultaneously predicting the vehicle trajectory and driving intention. The proposed model consists of three layers: a shared layer, an expert layer, and a fully connected layer. In the model, the shared layer utilizes Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN) to extract temporal features. Then the expert layer is built to identify different information according to the three tasks. Moreover, the fully connected layer is used to integrate and export prediction results. To achieve better performance, uncertainty algorithm is used to construct the multi-task loss function. Finally, the publicly available CitySim dataset validates the TMMOE model, demonstrating superior performance compared to the LSTM model, achieving the highest classification and regression results. Keywords: Vehicle trajectory prediction, driving intentions Classification, Multi-task

Conditional computation is a popular strategy to make Transformers more efficient. Existing methods often target individual modules (e.g., mixture-of-experts layers) or skip layers independently of one another. However, interpretability research has demonstrated that the middle layers of Transformers exhibit greater redundancy, and that early layers aggregate information into token positions. Guided by these insights, we propose a novel architecture that dynamically skips a variable number of layers from the middle outward. In particular, a learned gating mechanism determines whether to bypass a symmetric span of central blocks based on the input, and a gated attention mechanism prevents subsequent tokens from attending to skipped token positions. Residual norms are controlled with a 'sandwich' or 'perilayernorm' scheme and gate sparsity with an adaptive regularization loss. We had aimed to reduce compute requirements for 'simpler' tokens and potentially foster an emergent multi-level representational hierarchy but, at the scales investigated, our approach does not achieve improvements in the trade-off between validation cross-entropy and estimated FLOPs compared to dense baselines with fewer layers. We release our code at https://github.com/tim-lawson/skip-middle.

Current architectures for multi-modality tasks such as visual question answering suffer from their high complexity. As a result, these architectures are difficult to train and require high computational resources. To address these problems we present a CLIP-based architecture that does not require any fine-tuning of the feature extractors. A simple linear classifier is used on the concatenated features of the image and text encoder. During training an auxiliary loss is added which operates on the answer types. The resulting classification is then used as an attention gate on the answer class selection. On the VizWiz 2022 Visual Question Answering Challenge we achieve 60.15 % accuracy on Task 1: Predict Answer to a Visual Question and AP score of 83.78 % on Task 2: Predict Answerability of a Visual Question.

Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (DLGNs) are a very fast and energy-efficient alternative to conventional feed-forward networks. With learnable combinations of logical gates, DLGNs enable fast inference by hardware-friendly execution. Since the concept of DLGNs has only recently gained attention, these networks are still in their developmental infancy, including the design and scalability of their output layer. To date, this architecture has primarily been tested on datasets with up to ten classes. This work examines the behavior of DLGNs on large multi-class datasets. We investigate its general expressiveness, its scalability, and evaluate alternative output strategies. Using both synthetic and real-world datasets, we provide key insights into the importance of temperature tuning and its impact on output layer performance. We evaluate conditions under which the Group-Sum layer performs well and how it can be applied to large-scale classification of up to 2000 classes.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures have advanced the scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a sparse subset of parameters per input, enabling state-of-the-art performance with reduced computational cost. As these models are increasingly deployed in critical domains, understanding and strengthening their alignment mechanisms is essential to prevent harmful outputs. However, existing LLM safety research has focused almost exclusively on dense architectures, leaving the unique safety properties of MoEs largely unexamined. The modular, sparsely-activated design of MoEs suggests that safety mechanisms may operate differently than in dense models, raising questions about their robustness. In this paper, we present GateBreaker, the first training-free, lightweight, and architecture-agnostic attack framework that compromises the safety alignment of modern MoE LLMs at inference time. GateBreaker operates in three stages: (i) gate-level profiling, which identifies safety experts disproportionately routed on harmful inputs, (ii) expert-level localization, which localizes the safety structure within safety experts, and (iii) targeted safety removal, which disables the identified safety structure to compromise the safety alignment. Our study shows that MoE safety concentrates within a small subset of neurons coordinated by sparse routing. Selective disabling of these neurons, approximately 3% of neurons in the targeted expert layers, significantly increases the averaged attack success rate (ASR) from 7.4% to 64.9% against the eight latest aligned MoE LLMs with limited utility degradation. These safety neurons transfer across models within the same family, raising ASR from 17.9% to 67.7% with one-shot transfer attack. Furthermore, GateBreaker generalizes to five MoE vision language models (VLMs) with 60.9% ASR on unsafe image inputs.

While Attention Residuals has shown some effectiveness in addressing the widespread issue of unbounded activation growth across deep residual layers, it inevitably incurs significant communication overhead. To circumvent this bottleneck, we propose Multi-Gate Residuals (MGR), which stabilizes activation scales without additional communication burden. It utilizes a straightforward scoring and gating mechanism to maintain multi-stream context, coupled with Attention Pooling to extract hidden states from the stream states. Empirical experiments demonstrate that MGR is practical for large-scale training and deployment, offering tangible performance improvements over existing architectures.

Agentic language model systems alternate between two structurally distinct step types: structured tool calls (short, deterministic, low perplexity) and open-ended planning/reasoning steps (long, complex, high perplexity). Despite this heterogeneity, current inference systems apply identical compute to every step. We introduce LayerRoute, a lightweight adapter that learns to selectively skip transformer blocks on a per-input basis. LayerRoute augments each of the 24 transformer blocks in Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct with: (1) a per-layer router (~897 parameters, Linear(896,1)) that outputs a hard binary gate via the straight-through estimator, and (2) LoRA adapters (rank 8, ~1.08M parameters) on the Q/K/V/O attention projections. The backbone weights remain frozen. A single end-to-end training pass on agentic data (Hermes, Glaive, GSM8K, Turing) with a gate regularisation term forces the system to discover which blocks are skippable per input type. After 3,000 steps (6.4 minutes on an A100 40GB), LayerRoute achieves a 12.91% skip differential: tool calls skip 15.25% of FLOPs while planning steps skip only 2.34%, using only 1.10M trainable parameters (0.22% of the 494M backbone). Quality improves over the base model due to LoRA adaptation, with perplexity delta of -1.29 on tool calls and -1.30 on planning.

Quantization addresses the high resource demand for large language models (LLMs) by alleviating memory pressure and bandwidth congestion and providing significantly scaled compute power with a tolerable impact on accuracy. Four-bit floating point (FP4), the lowest-precision format that preserves essential numerical properties such as exponent and sign, has begun to be adopted in cutting-edge architectures, including Blackwell and AMD CDNA, to support LLM quantization and reduce deployment costs. Although aggressive quantization can yield efficiency gains, the quantization sensitivity of within-transformer layers and whether these sensitivities generalize across existing FP4 formats and model scales remain underexplored. To elucidate quantization sensitivity, this study conducts a systematic analysis of two FP4 formats, MXFP4 and NVFP4, across three Qwen2.5 model scales (0.5B, 7B, and 14B), using controlled component-wise and block-wise isolation methodologies. We observe that MLP up- and down-projection layers consistently dominate in terms of sensitivity, while gate and attention projections are moderately and substantially less sensitive to FP4 quantization, respectively. We further find that sensitivity does not universally localize to the final blocks, but early blocks can be highly sensitive, particularly under MXFP4. Our results provide a diagnostic characterization of the inference behavior of FP4 across components, depths, and FP4 formats.

The KV-Cache technique has become the standard for the inference of large language models (LLMs). It caches states of self-attention to avoid recomputation. Yet, it is widely criticized that KV-Cache can become a bottleneck of the LLM inference system, especially when confronted with ultra-large models and long-context queries. A natural remedy is to discard the KV-Cache for less important tokens, with StreamingLLM as an example, but the used static eviction strategies cannot flexibly adapt to varying contexts. Remedies like H2O leverage accumulative attention scores to perform dynamic eviction but suffer from the attention bias issue in capturing contextual information. This paper bridges this gap by devising a parameterized KV-Cache eviction mechanism, dubbed as Attention-Gate, which accepts the whole context as input and yields eviction flags for each token to realize in-context eviction. The subsequent self-attention module proceeds according to the flags and only the KV states for the remaining tokens need to be cached. The Attention-Gates can vary among different heads and layers and be trivially plugged into pre-trained LLMs, tuned by cost-effective continual pre-training or supervised fine-tuning objectives to acquire what to discard. The computational and memory overhead introduced by Attention-Gates is minimal. Our method is validated across multiple tasks, demonstrating both efficiency and adaptability. After a highly efficient continual pre-training, it achieves higher average accuracy and evicts more tokens compared to traditional training-free methods. In supervised fine-tuning, it not only evicts many tokens but also outperforms LoRA-finetuned LLMs on some datasets, such as RTE, where it improves accuracy by 13.9% while evicting 62.8% of tokens, showing that effective eviction of redundant tokens can even enhance performance.

Production LLM systems often rely on separate models for safety and other classification-heavy steps, increasing latency, VRAM footprint, and operational complexity. We instead reuse computation already paid for by the serving LLM: we train lightweight probes on its hidden states and predict labels in the same forward pass used for generation. We frame classification as representation selection over the full token-layer hidden-state tensor, rather than committing to a fixed token or fixed layer (e.g., first-token logits or final-layer pooling). To implement this, we introduce a two-stage aggregator that (i) summarizes tokens within each layer and (ii) aggregates across layer summaries to form a single representation for classification. We instantiate this template with direct pooling, a 100K-parameter scoring-attention gate, and a downcast multi-head self-attention (MHA) probe with up to 35M trainable parameters. Across safety and sentiment benchmarks our probes improve over logit-only reuse (e.g., MULI) and are competitive with substantially larger task-specific baselines, while preserving near-serving latency and avoiding the VRAM and latency costs of a separate guard-model pipeline.

Real-time EEG classification on edge devices is bottlenecked by the floating-point arithmetic of conventional neural networks. We investigated Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (Diff-Logic) as a hardware-native alternative that compiles models into pure Boolean circuits executable via bitwise CPU operations. Through rigorous iso-parameter experiments across four EEG datasets spanning two classification tasks, binary dementia detection and 3-class emotion recognition, we compared Diff-Logic against matched-capacity Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) and Binarized Neural Network (BNN) baselines at four complexity tiers (50k-500k parameters). On dementia screening, Diff-Logic achieved 80.2% Macro F1, outperforming the MLP baseline by 6.8%. On emotion recognition, the MLP retained a moderate performance advantage but incurred a 2.3times higher latency and 14times larger model size when deployed on a power-constrained (7W) Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano CPU (Single-core). Critically, Diff-Logic inference time remained nearly constant across a 10times increase in model scale, achieving a peak speedup of 2.9times over MLPs at the largest complexity tier. Our results establish logic-based neural architectures as a practical paradigm for resource-constrained brain-computer interfaces, achieving competitive or superior performance while natively satisfying the latency and memory constraints of portable edge deployment. Code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/Shyamal-Dharia/eeg-difflogic

In this paper, we propose a novel Hadamard Transform (HT)-based neural network layer for hybrid quantum-classical computing. It implements the regular convolutional layers in the Hadamard transform domain. The idea is based on the HT convolution theorem which states that the dyadic convolution between two vectors is equivalent to the element-wise multiplication of their HT representation. Computing the HT is simply the application of a Hadamard gate to each qubit individually, so the HT computations of our proposed layer can be implemented on a quantum computer. Compared to the regular Conv2D layer, the proposed HT-perceptron layer is computationally more efficient. Compared to a CNN with the same number of trainable parameters and 99.26\% test accuracy, our HT network reaches 99.31\% test accuracy with 57.1\% MACs reduced in the MNIST dataset; and in our ImageNet-1K experiments, our HT-based ResNet-50 exceeds the accuracy of the baseline ResNet-50 by 0.59\% center-crop top-1 accuracy using 11.5\% fewer parameters with 12.6\% fewer MACs.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) constitutes a complex neurocognitive disease and is the main cause of dementia. Although many studies have been proposed targeting at diagnosing dementia through spontaneous speech, there are still limitations. Existing state-of-the-art approaches, which propose multimodal methods, train separately language and acoustic models, employ majority-vote approaches, and concatenate the representations of the different modalities either at the input level, i.e., early fusion, or during training. Also, some of them employ self-attention layers, which calculate the dependencies between representations without considering the contextual information. In addition, no prior work has taken into consideration the model calibration. To address these limitations, we propose some new methods for detecting AD patients, which capture the intra- and cross-modal interactions. First, we convert the audio files into log-Mel spectrograms, their delta, and delta-delta and create in this way an image per audio file consisting of three channels. Next, we pass each transcript and image through BERT and DeiT models respectively. After that, context-based self-attention layers, self-attention layers with a gate model, and optimal transport domain adaptation methods are employed for capturing the intra- and inter-modal interactions. Finally, we exploit two methods for fusing the self and cross-attended features. For taking into account the model calibration, we apply label smoothing. We use both performance and calibration metrics. Experiments conducted on the ADReSS Challenge dataset indicate the efficacy of our introduced approaches over existing research initiatives with our best performing model reaching Accuracy and F1-score up to 91.25% and 91.06% respectively.

Transformer attention computes a single softmax-weighted average over values -- a one-pass estimate that cannot correct its own errors. We introduce gradient-boosted attention, which applies the principle of gradient boosting within a single attention layer: a second attention pass, with its own learned projections, attends to the prediction error of the first and applies a gated correction. Under a squared reconstruction objective, the construction maps onto Friedman's gradient boosting machine, with each attention pass as a base learner and the per-dimension gate as the shrinkage parameter. We show that a single Hopfield-style update erases all query information orthogonal to the stored-pattern subspace, and that further iteration under local contraction can collapse distinct queries in the same region to the same fixed point. We also show that separate projections for the correction pass can recover residual information inaccessible to the shared-projection approach of Tukey's twicing. On a 10M-token subset of WikiText-103, gradient-boosted attention achieves a test perplexity of 67.9 compared to 72.2 for standard attention, 69.6 for Twicing Attention, and 69.0 for a parameter-matched wider baseline, with two rounds capturing most of the benefit.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities on mathematical and multi-hop planning tasks. The CoCoNuT (Chain of Continuous Thought) paradigm~hao2024coconut extends this by enabling models to reason in latent space, exploring multiple reasoning paths simultaneously rather than committing to a single chain early on. However, we identify a limitation we term the concept bottleneck. At each reasoning pass, intermediate hidden states are overwritten, causing the model to lose critical facts computed in earlier steps as reasoning depth increases. We observe this empirically. On HotpotQA, vanilla CoCoNuT (10.4\% EM) fails to improve over the CoT baseline (11.0\% EM), and performance degrades with curriculum depth on GSM8K. To address this, we propose AGCLR (Adaptive Gated Continuous Latent Reasoning), which augments CoCoNuT with a Gated Concept Stream. A persistent residual memory maintained across all reasoning passes, controlled by three learned gates: a write gate that commits intermediate facts to memory, a read gate that retrieves relevant prior states, and a forget gate that prunes irrelevant context. Evaluated on GSM8K, HotpotQA, and ProsQA using GPT-2 as our base model, AGCLR achieves consistent improvements across all types of datasets. With the performance gap compounding as curriculum depth increases, directly resolving the concept bottleneck. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JJJJ/README.md

AI coding assistants now support a growing share of software work, from quick scripts to production applications. Yet these agents remain largely stateless: each new session re-reads project files, re-derives prior decisions, and - most costly - may repeat debugging attempts that already failed. Reconstructing this context can consume an estimated 5,000-20,000 tokens per session; the bottleneck is often not model capability but missing project memory. We present projectmem, an open-source, local-first memory and judgment layer for AI coding agents. projectmem records development as an append-only, plain-text event log of typed events - issues, attempts, fixes, decisions, and notes - and deterministically projects that log into compact, AI-readable summaries served through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Beyond storage, projectmem adds a deterministic pre-action gate that warns an agent before it repeats a previously failed fix or edits a known-fragile file. We frame this as Memory-as-Governance: memory that does not merely answer the agent but acts on its next action. The system runs fully offline with no telemetry; its immutable log also serves as a provenance trail for reproducible, auditable AI-assisted development. projectmem ships as a three-dependency Python package (14 MCP tools, 19 CLI commands, 37 automated tests) and is evaluated through a two-month self-study across 10 projects comprising 207 logged events. Source code: https://github.com/riponcm/projectmem.

Electrical control of individual spins and photons in solids is key for quantum technologies, but scaling down to small, static systems remains challenging. Here, we demonstrate nanoscale electrical tuning of neutral and charged excitons in monolayer WSe2 using 1-nm carbon nanotube gates. Electrostatic simulations reveal a confinement radius below 15 nm, reaching the exciton Bohr radius limit for few-layer dielectric spacing. In situ photoluminescence spectroscopy shows gate-controlled conversion between neutral excitons, negatively charged trions, and biexcitons at 4 K. Important for quantum information processing applications, our measurements indicate gating of a local 2D electron gas in the WSe2 layer, coupled to photons via trion transitions with binding energies exceeding 20 meV. The ability to deterministically tune and address quantum emitters using nanoscale gates provides a pathway towards large-scale quantum optoelectronic circuits and spin-photon interfaces for quantum networking.

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) is becoming popular due to its success in improving the model quality, especially in Transformers. By routing tokens with a sparse gate to a few experts (i.e., a small pieces of the full model), MoE can easily increase the model parameters to a very large scale while keeping the computation cost in a constant level. Most existing works just initialize some random experts, set a fixed gating strategy (e.g., Top-k), and train the model from scratch in an ad-hoc way. We identify that these MoE models are suffering from the immature experts and unstable sparse gate, which are harmful to the convergence performance. In this paper, we propose an efficient end-to-end MoE training framework called EvoMoE. EvoMoE starts from training one single expert and gradually evolves into a large and sparse MoE structure. EvoMoE mainly contains two phases: the expert-diversify phase to train the base expert for a while and spawn multiple diverse experts from it, and the gate-sparsify phase to learn an adaptive sparse gate and activate a dynamic number of experts. EvoMoE naturally decouples the joint learning of both the experts and the sparse gate and focuses on learning the basic knowledge with a single expert at the early training stage. Then it diversifies the experts and continues to train the MoE with a novel Dense-to-Sparse gate (DTS-Gate). Specifically, instead of using a permanent sparse gate, DTS-Gate begins as a dense gate that routes tokens to all experts, then gradually and adaptively becomes sparser while routes to fewer experts. Evaluations are conducted on three popular models and tasks, including RoBERTa for masked language modeling task, GPT for language modeling task and Transformer for machine translation task. The results show that EvoMoE outperforms existing baselines, including Switch, BASE Layer, Hash Layer and StableMoE.

Standard transformer architectures apply the same number of layers to every token regardless of contextual difficulty. We present Token-Selective Attention (TSA), a learned per-token gate on residual updates between consecutive transformer blocks. Each gate is a lightweight two-layer multi-layer perceptron (MLP) that produces a continuous halting probability, making the mechanism end-to-end differentiable with 1.7% parameter overhead and no changes to the base architecture. Notably, TSA learns difficulty-proportional routing without any explicit depth pressure: even at λ=0 (no depth regularisation), the task-loss gradient alone drives the router to skip 20% of token-layer operations. On character-level language modeling, TSA saved 14-23% of token-layer operations (TLOps) across Tiny-Shakespeare and enwik8 at <0.5% quality loss. At matched efficiency, TSA achieved 0.7% lower validation loss than early exit, and the learned routing transfers directly to inference-time sparse execution for real wall-clock speedup.

Memory and computation remain core bottlenecks in long-horizon LLM inference due to the quadratic cost of self-attention and the ever-growing key-value (KV) cache. Existing strategies for memory-bounded inference, such as quantization, offloading, or heuristic KV eviction, either incur high orchestration costs or rely on unreliable attention-based proxies of importance. We propose TRIM-KV, a novel approach that learns each token's intrinsic importance at creation time via a lightweight retention gate. Each gate predicts a scalar retention score that decays over time, reflecting the long-term utility of the token for a specific layer and head. Tokens with low scores are evicted when the memory budget is exceeded, ensuring that the cache always contains the most critical tokens. TRIM-KV is trained efficiently through distillation from a frozen LLM combined with a capacity loss, requiring only gate fine-tuning and adding negligible inference overhead. Across mathematical reasoning (GSM8K, MATH-500, AIME24), procedural generation (LongProc), conversational long-memory benchmarks (LongMemEval), and long-context understanding (LongBench and SCBench), TRIM-KV consistently outperforms strong eviction and learnable retrieval baselines, especially in low-memory regimes. Remarkably, it even surpasses full-cache models in some settings, showing that selective retention can serve as a form of regularization, suppressing noise from uninformative tokens. Qualitative analyses further reveal that learned retention scores align with human intuition, naturally recovering heuristics such as sink tokens, sliding windows, and gist compression without explicit design. Beyond efficiency, retention scores provide insights into layer- and head-specific roles, suggesting a new path toward LLM interpretability.

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. However, their deployment is hindered by significant computational costs. Existing structured pruning methods, while hardware-efficient, often suffer from significant accuracy degradation. In this paper, we argue that this failure stems from a stage-agnostic pruning approach that overlooks the asymmetric roles between the prefill and decode stages. By introducing a virtual gate mechanism, our importance analysis reveals that deep layers are critical for next-token prediction (decode) but largely redundant for context encoding (prefill). Leveraging this insight, we propose Prefill-Only Pruning (POP), a stage-aware inference strategy that safely omits deep layers during the computationally intensive prefill stage while retaining the full model for the sensitive decode stage. To enable the transition between stages, we introduce independent Key-Value (KV) projections to maintain cache integrity, and a boundary handling strategy to ensure the accuracy of the first generated token. Extensive experiments on Llama-3.1, Qwen3-VL, and Gemma-3 across diverse modalities demonstrate that POP achieves up to 1.37times speedup in prefill latency with minimal performance loss, effectively overcoming the accuracy-efficiency trade-off limitations of existing structured pruning methods.

Automated ICD-10 coding from clinical discharge summaries requires models that are both accurate on long-tailed multi-label classification tasks and interpretable to clinicians. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) offer a principled framework for interpretability by routing predictions through human-interpretable concepts, but this transparency often comes at a cost: compressing rich clinical text representations into a narrow concept layer can restrict gradient flow and limit predictive capacity. We present ShifaMind, a concept-grounded architecture built around a Multiplicative Concept Bottleneck (MCB), which changes the form, rather than the width, of the bottleneck. Instead of projecting through a narrow concept layer, ShifaMind uses a learned multiplicative gate over a concept-grounded representation while retaining a scalar concept interface for inspection. On MIMIC-IV top-50 ICD-10 coding, ShifaMind achieves performance competitive with LAAT, the strongest baseline, across F1, AUC, and ranking metrics, while outperforming five additional ICD-coding baselines and providing concept-mediated explanations. Its substantial gains over a capacity-matched Vanilla CBM in both predictive performance and interpretability-oriented metrics highlight the importance of the bottleneck design.

This paper introduces the N-Way Self-Evaluating Deliberation (NSED) protocol, a Runtime Mixture-of-Models (MoM) architecture that constructs emergent composite models from a plurality of distinct expert agents. Unlike traditional Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) which rely on static gating networks, NSED employs a Dynamic Expertise Broker - a runtime optimization engine that treats model selection as a variation of the Knapsack Problem, binding heterogeneous checkpoints to functional roles based on live telemetry and cost constraints. At the execution layer, we formalize deliberation as a Macro-Scale Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), where the consensus state loops back through a semantic forget gate to enable iterative refinement without proportional VRAM scaling. Key components include an orchestration fabric for trustless N-to-N peer review, a Quadratic Voting activation function for non-linear consensus, and a feedback-driven state update. Empirical validation on challenging benchmarks (AIME 2025, LiveCodeBench) demonstrates that this topology allows ensembles of small (less than 20B) consumer-grade models to match or exceed the performance of state-of-the-art 100B+ parameter models, establishing a new hardware arbitrage efficiency frontier. Furthermore, testing on the DarkBench safety suite reveals intrinsic alignment properties, with peer-mediated correction reducing sycophancy scores below that of any individual agent.

This paper presents a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning model for classification tasks, integrating a 4-qubit quantum circuit with a classical neural network. The quantum circuit is designed to encode the features of the Iris dataset using angle embedding and entangling gates, thereby capturing complex feature relationships that are difficult for classical models alone. The model, which we term a Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN), was trained over 20 epochs, achieving a perfect 100% accuracy on the Iris dataset test set on 16 epoch. Our results demonstrate the potential of quantum-enhanced models in supervised learning tasks, particularly in efficiently encoding and processing data using quantum resources. We detail the quantum circuit design, parameterized gate selection, and the integration of the quantum layer with classical neural network components. This work contributes to the growing body of research on hybrid quantum-classical models and their applicability to real-world datasets.

Models that rely on subword tokenization have significant drawbacks, such as sensitivity to character-level noise like spelling errors and inconsistent compression rates across different languages and scripts. While character- or byte-level models like ByT5 attempt to address these concerns, they have not gained widespread adoption -- processing raw byte streams without tokenization results in significantly longer sequence lengths, making training and inference inefficient. This work introduces MrT5 (MergeT5), a more efficient variant of ByT5 that integrates a token deletion mechanism in its encoder to dynamically shorten the input sequence length. After processing through a fixed number of encoder layers, a learnt delete gate determines which tokens are to be removed and which are to be retained for subsequent layers. MrT5 effectively ``merges'' critical information from deleted tokens into a more compact sequence, leveraging contextual information from the remaining tokens. In continued pre-training experiments, we find that MrT5 can achieve significant gains in inference runtime with minimal effect on performance. When trained on English text, MrT5 demonstrates the capability to transfer its deletion feature zero-shot across several languages, with significant additional improvements following multilingual training. Furthermore, MrT5 shows comparable accuracy to ByT5 on downstream evaluations such as XNLI and character-level tasks while reducing sequence lengths by up to 80%. Our approach presents a solution to the practical limitations of existing byte-level models.

In this study, we introduce the Multi-Head Explainer (MHEX), a versatile and modular framework that enhances both the explainability and accuracy of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Transformer-based models. MHEX consists of three core components: an Attention Gate that dynamically highlights task-relevant features, Deep Supervision that guides early layers to capture fine-grained details pertinent to the target class, and an Equivalent Matrix that unifies refined local and global representations to generate comprehensive saliency maps. Our approach demonstrates superior compatibility, enabling effortless integration into existing residual networks like ResNet and Transformer architectures such as BERT with minimal modifications. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets in medical imaging and text classification show that MHEX not only improves classification accuracy but also produces highly interpretable and detailed saliency scores.

Deep networks often suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients due to inefficient signal propagation, leading to long training times or convergence difficulties. Various architecture designs, sophisticated residual-style networks, and initialization schemes have been shown to improve deep signal propagation. Recently, Pennington et al. used free probability theory to show that dynamical isometry plays an integral role in efficient deep learning. We show that the simplest architecture change of gating each residual connection using a single zero-initialized parameter satisfies initial dynamical isometry and outperforms more complex approaches. Although much simpler than its predecessors, this gate enables training thousands of fully connected layers with fast convergence and better test performance for ResNets trained on CIFAR-10. We apply this technique to language modeling and find that we can easily train 120-layer Transformers. When applied to 12 layer Transformers, it converges 56% faster on enwiki8.

Sign language generation (SLG) aims to translate written texts into expressive sign motions, bridging communication barriers for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing communities. Recent studies formulate SLG within the language modeling framework using autoregressive language models, which suffer from unidirectional context modeling and slow token-by-token inference. To address these limitations, we present MaDiS, a masked-diffusion-based language model for SLG that captures bidirectional dependencies and supports efficient parallel multi-token generation. We further introduce a tri-level cross-modal pretraining scheme that jointly learns from token-, latent-, and 3D physical-space objectives to leverage complementary, multi-level sign representations. To accelerate model convergence in the fine-tuning stage, we design a novel unmasking strategy with temporal checkpoints, which restructures generation in a coarse-to-fine manner and reduces the combinatorial complexity of unmasking orders by over 10^{41} times. In addition, a mixture-of-parts embedding layer is developed to effectively fuse information stored in different part-wise sign tokens through a learnable gate and well-optimized codebooks. Extensive experiments on CSL-Daily, Phoenix-2014T, and How2Sign demonstrate that MaDiS achieves superior performance across multiple metrics, including DTW error and two newly introduced metrics, SiBLEU and SiCLIP, while delivering a 40\% higher throughput. Code and models will be publicly released.

Agent harnesses -- the stateful programs that wrap a language model and decide what it sees at each step -- are now known to change end-to-end performance on a fixed model by as much as six times. That raises a question asked less often than it should be: how much of an agent's competence does the harness itself already carry, and how much genuinely still needs the LLM? We externalize a planning harness for noisy Collaborative Battleship into four progressively richer layers -- posterior belief tracking, declarative planning, symbolic reflec tion, and an LLM-backed revision gate -- under a common runtime, taking win rate as the primary metric and F1 as secondary, and pre-specifying heavy lifting as the single largest positive marginal to the primary metric. Across 54 games, declarative pla nning carries the heavy lifting (+24.1pp win rate over a belief-only harness, zero LLM calls); symbolic reflection is mechanistically real but calibration-sensitive, with signed board-level effects up to pm0.140 F1 that cancel on aggregate; and LLM-backed revision ac tivates on only 4.3% of turns with a bounded, non-monotonic effect. The contribution is methodological: once harness layers are made externally measurable, the LLM's role can be quantified as residual rather than assumed central.

Dense-to-sparse gating mixture of experts (MoE) has recently become an effective alternative to a well-known sparse MoE. Rather than fixing the number of activated experts as in the latter model, which could limit the investigation of potential experts, the former model utilizes the temperature to control the softmax weight distribution and the sparsity of the MoE during training in order to stabilize the expert specialization. Nevertheless, while there are previous attempts to theoretically comprehend the sparse MoE, a comprehensive analysis of the dense-to-sparse gating MoE has remained elusive. Therefore, we aim to explore the impacts of the dense-to-sparse gate on the maximum likelihood estimation under the Gaussian MoE in this paper. We demonstrate that due to interactions between the temperature and other model parameters via some partial differential equations, the convergence rates of parameter estimations are slower than any polynomial rates, and could be as slow as O(1/log(n)), where n denotes the sample size. To address this issue, we propose using a novel activation dense-to-sparse gate, which routes the output of a linear layer to an activation function before delivering them to the softmax function. By imposing linearly independence conditions on the activation function and its derivatives, we show that the parameter estimation rates are significantly improved to polynomial rates.

A method is presented for accelerating inference in transformer language models by exploiting the low effective rank of the token activation manifold at each layer. The method decomposes each activation vector into a subspace component and a residual, computes the linear-layer output on the subspace component via a cached low-rank weight image at reduced memory bandwidth, and applies a per-token gate that determines whether the residual correction is computed or skipped. The gate ensures that the output distribution is preserved to within a controllable tolerance. Validation on three model families (GPT-2 124M, GPT-J 6B, OPT 6.7B) on AMD MI300X demonstrates effective speedups of 3.0x to 10.5x on linear-layer weight reads with perplexity ratios below 1.00 and top-1 token agreement above 98%. The method requires no retraining, no architectural modification, and no approximation of the attention mechanism. At the operating point (k = 256, ε = 0.05) on GPT-J 14 6B, the accelerated model produces character-for-character identical output to the baseline.

Gated Linear Units (GLUs) have become essential components in the feed-forward networks of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they require twice as many memory reads compared to feed-forward layers without gating, due to the use of separate weight matrices for the gate and value streams. To address this bottleneck, we introduce Masked Gated Linear Units (MGLUs), a novel family of GLUs with an efficient kernel implementation. The core contribution of MGLUs include: (1) the Mixture of Element-wise Gating (MoEG) architecture that learns multiple binary masks, each determining gate or value assignments at the element level on a single shared weight matrix resulting in reduced memory transfer, and (2) FlashMGLU, a hardware-friendly kernel that yields up to a 19.7 times inference-time speed-up over a naive PyTorch MGLU and is 47% more memory-efficient and 34% faster than standard GLUs despite added architectural complexity on an RTX5090 GPU. In LLM experiments, the Swish-activated variant SwiMGLU preserves its memory advantages while matching - or even surpassing - the downstream accuracy of the SwiGLU baseline.

Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying this capability in open-weights models. First, we find that it is behaviorally robust: models detect injected steering vectors at moderate rates with 0% false positives across diverse prompts and dialogue formats. Notably, this capability emerges specifically from post-training; we show that preference optimization algorithms like DPO can elicit it, but standard supervised finetuning does not. We provide evidence that detection cannot be explained by simple linear association between certain steering vectors and directions promoting affirmative responses. We trace the detection mechanism to a two-stage circuit in which "evidence carrier" features in early post-injection layers detect perturbations monotonically along diverse directions, suppressing downstream "gate" features that implement a default negative response. This circuit is absent in base models and robust to refusal ablation. Identification of injected concepts relies on largely distinct later-layer mechanisms that only weakly overlap with those involved in detection. Finally, we show that introspective capability is substantially underelicited: ablating refusal directions improves detection by +53%, and a trained bias vector improves it by +75% on held-out concepts, both without meaningfully increasing false positives. Our results suggest that this introspective awareness of injected concepts is robust and mechanistically nontrivial, and could be substantially amplified in future models. Code: https://github.com/safety-research/introspection-mechanisms.

Adapting LLM agents to domain-specific tool calling remains notably brittle under evolving interfaces. Prompt and schema engineering is easy to deploy but often fragile under distribution shift and strict parsers, while continual parameter-efficient fine-tuning improves reliability at the cost of training, maintenance, and potential forgetting. We identify a critical Lazy Agent failure mode where tool necessity is nearly perfectly decodable from mid-layer activations, yet the model remains conservative in entering tool mode, revealing a representation-behavior gap. We propose Activation Steering Adapter (ASA), a training-free, inference-time controller that performs a single-shot mid-layer intervention and targets tool domains via a router-conditioned mixture of steering vectors with a probe-guided signed gate to amplify true intent while suppressing spurious triggers. On MTU-Bench with Qwen2.5-1.5B, ASA improves strict tool-use F1 from 0.18 to 0.50 while reducing the false positive rate from 0.15 to 0.05, using only about 20KB of portable assets and no weight updates.

Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models. A practical way to obtain such models is to convert a pretrained Transformer instead of pretraining a new architecture from scratch, but this conversion is still brittle. Simply copying the teacher attention projections into a Gated DeltaNet (GDN) student does not specify the new recurrent decay, write, and output-gating dynamics. As a result, the converted model often starts in a poor dynamical regime and must spend many distillation tokens repairing initialization rather than learning the remaining teacher behavior. We propose Taylor-Calibrate, a lightweight initialization method for hybrid GDN students. The method uses Taylor-guided teacher attention statistics to set the value projection, memory timescale, write gates, and output gate, then applies a short per-layer alignment step to match each converted layer to the teacher output. Across four teacher settings and three retained-layer policies, Taylor-Calibrate gives substantially stronger zero-shot students, with up to an 88x improvement in a representative ablation, and reaches matched recovery targets with 4.9x--9.2x fewer training tokens than naive conversion.

Real-image super-resolution (Real-ISR) seeks to recover HR images from LR inputs with mixed, unknown degradations. While diffusion models surpass GANs in perceptual quality, they under-reconstruct high-frequency (HF) details due to a low-frequency (LF) bias and a depth-wise "low-first, high-later" hierarchy. We introduce FRAMER, a plug-and-play training scheme that exploits diffusion priors without changing the backbone or inference. At each denoising step, the final-layer feature map teaches all intermediate layers. Teacher and student feature maps are decomposed into LF/HF bands via FFT masks to align supervision with the model's internal frequency hierarchy. For LF, an Intra Contrastive Loss (IntraCL) stabilizes globally shared structure. For HF, an Inter Contrastive Loss (InterCL) sharpens instance-specific details using random-layer and in-batch negatives. Two adaptive modulators, Frequency-based Adaptive Weight (FAW) and Frequency-based Alignment Modulation (FAM), reweight per-layer LF/HF signals and gate distillation by current similarity. Across U-Net and DiT backbones (e.g., Stable Diffusion 2, 3), FRAMER consistently improves PSNR/SSIM and perceptual metrics (LPIPS, NIQE, MANIQA, MUSIQ). Ablations validate the final-layer teacher and random-layer negatives.

Fine-grained sparsity promises higher parametric capacity without proportional per-token compute, but often suffers from training instability, load balancing, and communication overhead. We introduce STEM (Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules), a static, token-indexed approach that replaces the FFN up-projection with a layer-local embedding lookup while keeping the gate and down-projection dense. This removes runtime routing, enables CPU offload with asynchronous prefetch, and decouples capacity from both per-token FLOPs and cross-device communication. Empirically, STEM trains stably despite extreme sparsity. It improves downstream performance over dense baselines while reducing per-token FLOPs and parameter accesses (eliminating roughly one-third of FFN parameters). STEM learns embedding spaces with large angular spread which enhances its knowledge storage capacity. More interestingly, this enhanced knowledge capacity comes with better interpretability. The token-indexed nature of STEM embeddings allows simple ways to perform knowledge editing and knowledge injection in an interpretable manner without any intervention in the input text or additional computation. In addition, STEM strengthens long-context performance: as sequence length grows, more distinct parameters are activated, yielding practical test-time capacity scaling. Across 350M and 1B model scales, STEM delivers up to ~3--4% accuracy improvements overall, with notable gains on knowledge and reasoning-heavy benchmarks (ARC-Challenge, OpenBookQA, GSM8K, MMLU). Overall, STEM is an effective way of scaling parametric memory while providing better interpretability, better training stability and improved efficiency.

In text-to-video (T2V) generation, significant attention has been directed toward its development, yet unifying discrete and continuous grounding conditions in T2V generation remains under-explored. This paper proposes a Grounded text-to-Video generation framework, termed GVDIFF. First, we inject the grounding condition into the self-attention through an uncertainty-based representation to explicitly guide the focus of the network. Second, we introduce a spatial-temporal grounding layer that connects the grounding condition with target objects and enables the model with the grounded generation capacity in the spatial-temporal domain. Third, our dynamic gate network adaptively skips the redundant grounding process to selectively extract grounding information and semantics while improving efficiency. We extensively evaluate the grounded generation capacity of GVDIFF and demonstrate its versatility in applications, including long-range video generation, sequential prompts, and object-specific editing.

How can we teach large multimodal models (LMMs) new skills without erasing prior abilities? We study sequential fine-tuning on five target skills while monitoring general ability on eight held-out benchmarks across three model families. We observe that apparent "forgetting" on held-out tasks after narrow fine-tuning can partly recover at later stages. We trace this behavior to a measurable shift in the output token distribution, manifested through a simple counting-bias probe that co-varies with forgetting. Guided by this picture, we identify two simple, robust tuning recipes that learn strongly while limiting drift: (i) updating only the self-attention projection layers, and (ii) updating only the MLP Gate&Up while freezing the Down projection. Across models and tasks, these choices deliver strong target gains while largely preserving held-out performance. Code is available at https://github.com/jessemelpolio/LMM_CL

Change detection from high-resolution remote sensing images lies as a cornerstone of Earth observation applications, yet its efficacy is often compromised by two critical challenges. First, false alarms are prevalent as models misinterpret radiometric variations from temporal shifts (e.g., illumination, season) as genuine changes. Second, a non-negligible semantic gap between deep abstract features and shallow detail-rich features tends to obstruct their effective fusion, culminating in poorly delineated boundaries. To step further in addressing these issues, we propose the Frequency-Spatial Synergistic Gated Network (FSG-Net), a novel paradigm that aims to systematically disentangle semantic changes from nuisance variations. Specifically, FSG-Net first operates in the frequency domain, where a Discrepancy-Aware Wavelet Interaction Module (DAWIM) adaptively mitigates pseudo-changes by discerningly processing different frequency components. Subsequently, the refined features are enhanced in the spatial domain by a Synergistic Temporal-Spatial Attention Module (STSAM), which amplifies the saliency of genuine change regions. To finally bridge the semantic gap, a Lightweight Gated Fusion Unit (LGFU) leverages high-level semantics to selectively gate and integrate crucial details from shallow layers. Comprehensive experiments on the CDD, GZ-CD, and LEVIR-CD benchmarks validate the superiority of FSG-Net, establishing a new state-of-the-art with F1-scores of 94.16%, 89.51%, and 91.27%, respectively. The code will be made available at https://github.com/zxXie-Air/FSG-Net after a possible publication.

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) provide a promising framework for energy-efficient and biologically grounded computation; however, scalable learning in deep recurrent architectures with sparse connectivity remains a major challenge. In this work, we propose a structured multi-layer recurrent SNN architecture composed of locally dense recurrent layers augmented with sparse small-world long-range projections to a readout population. The long-range connectivity is largely fixed, preserving routing efficiency and hardware scalability, while synaptic adaptation is performed using strictly local plasticity mechanisms. To enable supervised learning without backpropagation or surrogate gradients, we introduce a biologically motivated learning framework that combines: (i) population-based winner-take-all (WTA) teaching signals at the output layer, (ii) fixed random broadcast alignment feedback pathways, and (iii) low-dimensional modulatory neuron populations that gate synaptic updates through three-factor learning rules with eligibility traces. This design supports deep recurrent computation with sparse global communication and purely local synaptic updates. We analyze the algorithmic properties, computational complexity, and hardware feasibility of the proposed approach, and demonstrate stable learning and competitive performance on benchmark classification tasks. The results highlight the potential of structured recurrence and neuromodulatory learning to enable scalable, hardware-compatible SNN training beyond gradient-based methods.

The objective of continual learning (CL) is to learn tasks sequentially without retraining on earlier tasks. However, when subjected to CL, traditional neural networks exhibit catastrophic forgetting and limited generalization. To overcome these problems, we introduce a novel method called 'Gate and Obstruct Network' (GateON). GateON combines learnable gating of activity and online estimation of parameter relevance to safeguard crucial knowledge from being overwritten. Our method generates partially overlapping pathways between tasks which permits forward and backward transfer during sequential learning. GateON addresses the issue of network saturation after parameter fixation by a re-activation mechanism of fixed neurons, enabling large-scale continual learning. GateON is implemented on a wide range of networks (fully-connected, CNN, Transformers), has low computational complexity, effectively learns up to 100 MNIST learning tasks, and achieves top-tier results for pre-trained BERT in CL-based NLP tasks.

Modern neural networks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on numerous existing benchmarks; however, their high computational requirements and energy consumption prompt researchers to seek more efficient solutions for real-world deployment. Logic gate networks (LGNs) learns a large network of logic gates for efficient image classification. However, learning a network that can solve a simple problem like CIFAR-10 can take days to weeks to train. Even then, almost half of the network remains unused, causing a discretization gap. This discretization gap hinders real-world deployment of LGNs, as the performance drop between training and inference negatively impacts accuracy. We inject Gumbel noise with a straight-through estimator during training to significantly speed up training, improve neuron utilization, and decrease the discretization gap. We theoretically show that this results from implicit Hessian regularization, which improves the convergence properties of LGNs. We train networks 4.5 times faster in wall-clock time, reduce the discretization gap by 98%, and reduce the number of unused gates by 100%.

Active Speaker Detection (ASD) aims to identify who is currently speaking in each frame of a video. Most state-of-the-art approaches rely on late fusion to combine visual and audio features, but late fusion often fails to capture fine-grained cross-modal interactions, which can be critical for robust performance in unconstrained scenarios. In this paper, we introduce GateFusion, a novel architecture that combines strong pretrained unimodal encoders with a Hierarchical Gated Fusion Decoder (HiGate). HiGate enables progressive, multi-depth fusion by adaptively injecting contextual features from one modality into the other at multiple layers of the Transformer backbone, guided by learnable, bimodally-conditioned gates. To further strengthen multimodal learning, we propose two auxiliary objectives: Masked Alignment Loss (MAL) to align unimodal outputs with multimodal predictions, and Over-Positive Penalty (OPP) to suppress spurious video-only activations. GateFusion establishes new state-of-the-art results on several challenging ASD benchmarks, achieving 77.8% mAP (+9.4%), 86.1% mAP (+2.9%), and 96.1% mAP (+0.5%) on Ego4D-ASD, UniTalk, and WASD benchmarks, respectively, and delivering competitive performance on AVA-ActiveSpeaker. Out-of-domain experiments demonstrate the generalization of our model, while comprehensive ablations show the complementary benefits of each component.

Deep learning yields great results across many fields, from speech recognition, image classification, to translation. But for each problem, getting a deep model to work well involves research into the architecture and a long period of tuning. We present a single model that yields good results on a number of problems spanning multiple domains. In particular, this single model is trained concurrently on ImageNet, multiple translation tasks, image captioning (COCO dataset), a speech recognition corpus, and an English parsing task. Our model architecture incorporates building blocks from multiple domains. It contains convolutional layers, an attention mechanism, and sparsely-gated layers. Each of these computational blocks is crucial for a subset of the tasks we train on. Interestingly, even if a block is not crucial for a task, we observe that adding it never hurts performance and in most cases improves it on all tasks. We also show that tasks with less data benefit largely from joint training with other tasks, while performance on large tasks degrades only slightly if at all.

Several recent Transformer architectures expose later layers to representations computed in the earliest layers, motivated by the observation that low-level features can become harder to recover as the residual stream is repeatedly transformed through depth. The cheapest among these methods add static value residuals: learned mixing coefficients that expose the first-layer value projection V_1 uniformly across tokens and heads. More expressive dense or dynamic alternatives recover finer-grained access, but at higher memory cost and lower throughput. The usefulness of V_1 is unlikely to be constant across tokens, heads, and contexts; different positions plausibly require different amounts of access to early lexical or semantic information. We therefore treat early-representation reuse as a retrieval problem rather than a connectivity problem, and introduce Selective Access Transformer (SATFormer), which preserves the first-layer value pathway while controlling access with a context-dependent gate. Across models from 130M to 1.3B parameters, SATFormer consistently improves validation loss and zero-shot accuracy over the static value-residual and Transformer baselines. Its strongest gains appear on retrieval-intensive benchmarks, where it improves over static value residuals by approximately 1.5 average points, while maintaining throughput and memory usage close to the baseline Transformer. Gate analyses suggest sparse, depth-dependent, head-specific, and category-sensitive access patterns, supporting the interpretation that SATFormer learns selective reuse of early representations rather than uniform residual copying. Our code is available at https://github.com/SkyeGunasekaran/SATFormer.

The most important architectural problem in AI is not the size of the model but the absence of a layer that carries forward what the model has come to understand. Sessions end. Context windows fill. Memory APIs return flat facts that the model has to reinterpret from scratch on every read. The result is intelligence that is powerful per session and amnesiac across time. This position paper argues that the layer which fixes this, the continuity layer, is the most consequential piece of infrastructure the field has not yet built, and that the engineering work to build it has begun in public. The formal evaluation framework for the property described here is the ATANT benchmark (arXiv:2604.06710), published separately with evaluation results on a 250-story corpus; a companion paper (arXiv:2604.10981) positions this framework against existing memory, long-context, and agentic-memory benchmarks. The paper defines continuity as a system property with seven required characteristics, distinct from memory and from retrieval; describes a storage primitive (Decomposed Trace Convergence Memory) whose write-time decomposition and read-time reconstruction produce that property; maps the engineering architecture to the theological pattern of kenosis and the symbolic pattern of Alpha and Omega, and argues this mapping is structural rather than metaphorical; proposes a four-layer development arc from external SDK to hardware node to long-horizon human infrastructure; examines why the physics limits now constraining the model layer make the continuity layer newly consequential; and argues that the governance architecture (privacy implemented as physics rather than policy, founder-controlled class shares on non-negotiable architectural commitments) is inseparable from the product itself.

Memory layers use a trainable key-value lookup mechanism to add extra parameters to a model without increasing FLOPs. Conceptually, sparsely activated memory layers complement compute-heavy dense feed-forward layers, providing dedicated capacity to store and retrieve information cheaply. This work takes memory layers beyond proof-of-concept, proving their utility at contemporary scale. On downstream tasks, language models augmented with our improved memory layer outperform dense models with more than twice the computation budget, as well as mixture-of-expert models when matched for both compute and parameters. We find gains are especially pronounced for factual tasks. We provide a fully parallelizable memory layer implementation, demonstrating scaling laws with up to 128B memory parameters, pretrained to 1 trillion tokens, comparing to base models with up to 8B parameters.

Mobile and embedded machine learning developers frequently have to compromise between two inferior on-device deployment strategies: sacrifice accuracy and aggressively shrink their models to run on dedicated low-power cores; or sacrifice battery by running larger models on more powerful compute cores such as neural processing units or the main application processor. In this paper, we propose a novel Gated Compression layer that can be applied to transform existing neural network architectures into Gated Neural Networks. Gated Neural Networks have multiple properties that excel for on-device use cases that help significantly reduce power, boost accuracy, and take advantage of heterogeneous compute cores. We provide results across five public image and audio datasets that demonstrate the proposed Gated Compression layer effectively stops up to 96% of negative samples, compresses 97% of positive samples, while maintaining or improving model accuracy.

To understand the learning process in brains, biologically plausible algorithms have been explored by modeling the detailed neuron properties and dynamics. On the other hand, simplified multi-layer models of neural networks have shown great success on computational tasks such as image classification and speech recognition. However, the computational models that can achieve good accuracy for these learning applications are very different from the bio-plausible models. This paper studies whether a bio-plausible model of a in vitro living neural network can be used to perform machine learning tasks and achieve good inference accuracy. A novel two-layer bio-hardware hybrid neural network is proposed. The biological layer faithfully models variations of synapses, neurons, and network sparsity in in vitro living neural networks. The hardware layer is a computational fully-connected layer that tunes parameters to optimize for accuracy. Several techniques are proposed to improve the inference accuracy of the proposed hybrid neural network. For instance, an adaptive pre-processing technique helps the proposed neural network to achieve good learning accuracy for different living neural network sparsity. The proposed hybrid neural network with realistic neuron parameters and variations achieves a 98.3% testing accuracy for the handwritten digit recognition task on the full MNIST dataset.

Transformers have gained popularity in machine learning due to their application in the field of natural language processing. They manipulate and process text efficiently, capturing long-range dependencies among data and performing the next word prediction. On the other hand, gate-based quantum computing is based on controlling the register of qubits in the quantum hardware by applying a sequence of gates, a process which can be interpreted as a low level text programming language. We develop a transformer model capable of transpiling quantum circuits from the qasm standard to other sets of gates native suited for a specific target quantum hardware, in our case the set for the trapped-ion quantum computers of IonQ. The feasibility of a translation up to five qubits is demonstrated with a percentage of correctly transpiled target circuits equal or superior to 99.98%. Regardless the depth of the register and the number of gates applied, we prove that the complexity of the transformer model scales, in the worst case scenario, with a polynomial trend by increasing the depth of the register and the length of the circuit, allowing models with a higher number of parameters to be efficiently trained on HPC infrastructures.

Activation functions are core components of all deep learning architectures. Currently, the most popular activation functions are smooth ReLU variants like GELU and SiLU. These are self-gated activation functions where the range of the gating function is between zero and one. In this paper, we explore the viability of using arctan as a gating mechanism. A self-gated activation function that uses arctan as its gating function has a monotonically increasing first derivative. To make this activation function competitive, it is necessary to introduce a trainable parameter for every MLP block to expand the range of the gating function beyond zero and one. We find that this technique also improves existing self-gated activation functions. We conduct an empirical evaluation of Expanded ArcTan Linear Unit (xATLU), Expanded GELU (xGELU), and Expanded SiLU (xSiLU) and show that they outperform existing activation functions within a transformer architecture. Additionally, expanded gating ranges show promising results in improving first-order Gated Linear Units (GLU).

Conventional semiconductor-based integrated circuits are gradually approaching fundamental scaling limits. Many prospective solutions have recently emerged to supplement or replace both the technology on which basic devices are built and the architecture of data processing. Neuromorphic circuits are a promising approach to computing where techniques used by the brain to achieve high efficiency are exploited. Many existing neuromorphic circuits rely on unconventional and useful properties of novel technologies to better mimic the operation of the brain. One such technology is single flux quantum (SFQ) logic -- a cryogenic superconductive technology in which the data are represented by quanta of magnetic flux (fluxons) produced and processed by Josephson junctions embedded within inductive loops. The movement of a fluxon within a circuit produces a quantized voltage pulse (SFQ pulse), resembling a neuronal spiking event. These circuits routinely operate at clock frequencies of tens to hundreds of gigahertz, making SFQ a natural technology for processing high frequency pulse trains. Prior proposals for SFQ neural networks often require energy-expensive fluxon conversions, involve heterogeneous technologies, or exclusively focus on device level behavior. In this paper, a design methodology for deep single flux quantum neuromorphic networks is presented. Synaptic and neuronal circuits based on SFQ technology are presented and characterized. Based on these primitives, a deep neuromorphic XOR network is evaluated as a case study, both at the architectural and circuit levels, achieving wide classification margins. The proposed methodology does not employ unconventional superconductive devices or semiconductor transistors. The resulting networks are tunable by an external current, making this proposed system an effective approach for scalable cryogenic neuromorphic computing.

A causal-decoder block is hierarchical: lower layers build the residual basis that upper layers attend over. We identify a failure mode in GPT pretraining: upper layers commit to sharp attention patterns before lower-layer features stabilize. We call this premature upper-layer attention specialization. Temporarily slowing only upper-layer Q/K projections during early training improves final perplexity and downstream accuracy without altering other parameters; it prevents upper attention from collapsing onto an immature residual basis. In LLaMA-style blocks, the same intervention is nearly unnecessary. Through ablations, we isolate multiplicative gated FFNs (not RMSNorm or bias removal) as the component that suppresses the upstream residual writes driving the failure. A pathwise analysis unifies both findings: the learning-rate intervention reduces a step-size factor, while gated FFNs reduce a residual-energy factor on the same growth pathway. Our results identify upper-layer Q/K timing as a concrete interaction point between decoder architecture and optimization.

We present LayerSkip, an end-to-end solution to speed-up inference of large language models (LLMs). First, during training we apply layer dropout, with low dropout rates for earlier layers and higher dropout rates for later layers, and an early exit loss where all transformer layers share the same exit. Second, during inference, we show that this training recipe increases the accuracy of early exit at earlier layers, without adding any auxiliary layers or modules to the model. Third, we present a novel self-speculative decoding solution where we exit at early layers and verify and correct with remaining layers of the model. Our proposed self-speculative decoding approach has less memory footprint than other speculative decoding approaches and benefits from shared compute and activations of the draft and verification stages. We run experiments on different Llama model sizes on different types of training: pretraining from scratch, continual pretraining, finetuning on specific data domain, and finetuning on specific task. We implement our inference solution and show speedups of up to 2.16x on summarization for CNN/DM documents, 1.82x on coding, and 2.0x on TOPv2 semantic parsing task. We open source our code and checkpoints at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LayerSkip.

Layer compositing is one of the most popular image editing workflows among both amateurs and professionals. Motivated by the success of diffusion models, we explore layer compositing from a layered image generation perspective. Instead of generating an image, we propose to generate background, foreground, layer mask, and the composed image simultaneously. To achieve layered image generation, we train an autoencoder that is able to reconstruct layered images and train diffusion models on the latent representation. One benefit of the proposed problem is to enable better compositing workflows in addition to the high-quality image output. Another benefit is producing higher-quality layer masks compared to masks produced by a separate step of image segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to generate high-quality layered images and initiates a benchmark for future work.

We introduce a general-purpose conditioning method for neural networks called FiLM: Feature-wise Linear Modulation. FiLM layers influence neural network computation via a simple, feature-wise affine transformation based on conditioning information. We show that FiLM layers are highly effective for visual reasoning - answering image-related questions which require a multi-step, high-level process - a task which has proven difficult for standard deep learning methods that do not explicitly model reasoning. Specifically, we show on visual reasoning tasks that FiLM layers 1) halve state-of-the-art error for the CLEVR benchmark, 2) modulate features in a coherent manner, 3) are robust to ablations and architectural modifications, and 4) generalize well to challenging, new data from few examples or even zero-shot.

Deep neural networks have made significant progress in the field of computer vision. Recent studies have shown that depth, width and shortcut connections of neural network architectures play a crucial role in their performance. One of the most advanced neural network architectures, DenseNet, has achieved excellent convergence rates through dense connections. However, it still has obvious shortcomings in the usage of amount of memory. In this paper, we introduce a new type of pruning tool, threshold, which refers to the principle of the threshold voltage in MOSFET. This work employs this method to connect blocks of different depths in different ways to reduce the usage of memory. It is denoted as ThresholdNet. We evaluate ThresholdNet and other different networks on datasets of CIFAR10. Experiments show that HarDNet is twice as fast as DenseNet, and on this basis, ThresholdNet is 10% faster and 10% lower error rate than HarDNet.

Architecture optimization, which is a technique for finding an efficient neural network that meets certain requirements, generally reduces to a set of multiple-choice selection problems among alternative sub-structures or parameters. The discrete nature of the selection problem, however, makes this optimization difficult. To tackle this problem we introduce a novel concept of a trainable gate function. The trainable gate function, which confers a differentiable property to discretevalued variables, allows us to directly optimize loss functions that include non-differentiable discrete values such as 0-1 selection. The proposed trainable gate can be applied to pruning. Pruning can be carried out simply by appending the proposed trainable gate functions to each intermediate output tensor followed by fine-tuning the overall model, using any gradient-based training methods. So the proposed method can jointly optimize the selection of the pruned channels while fine-tuning the weights of the pruned model at the same time. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method efficiently optimizes arbitrary neural networks in various tasks such as image classification, style transfer, optical flow estimation, and neural machine translation.

Despite advances in transformer-based language models (LMs), a fundamental question remains largely unanswered: Are all layers activated during inference? We investigate this question by detecting unactivated layers (which we refer to as Voids) using a non-trainable and parameter-free adaptive computation method called L2 Adaptive Computation (LAC). We adapt LAC from its original efficiency-focused application to trace activated layers during inference. This method monitors changes in the L2-norm of activations to identify voids. We analyze layer activation in instruction-tuned LMs across two phases: Prompt Processing (PP), where we trace activated layers for each token in the input prompts, and Response Generation (RG), where we trace activated layers for each generated token. We further demonstrate that distinct layers are activated during these two phases. To show the effectiveness of our method, we evaluated three distinct instruction-tuned LMs from the Llama, Mistral, and Qwen families on three benchmarks: MMLU, GPQA Diamond, and BoolQ. For example, on MMLU with a zero-shot setting, skipping voids in Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct resulted in an improvement from 69.24 to 71.29 while the model uses only 30% of the layers. Similarly, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 on GPQA Diamond improved from 13.88 to 18.36 when using 70% of the layers during both the PP and RG phases. These results show that not all layers contribute equally during inference, and that selectively skipping most of them can improve the performance of models on certain tasks.

Differentiable logic gate networks (DLGNs) exhibit extraordinary efficiency at inference while sustaining competitive accuracy. But vanishing gradients, discretization errors, and high training cost impede scaling these networks. Even with dedicated parameter initialization schemes from subsequent works, increasing depth still harms accuracy. We show that the root cause of these issues lies in the underlying parametrization of logic gate neurons themselves. To overcome this issue, we propose a reparametrization that also shrinks the parameter size logarithmically in the number of inputs per gate. For binary inputs, this already reduces the model size by 4x, speeds up the backward pass by up to 1.86x, and converges in 8.5x fewer training steps. On top of that, we show that the accuracy on CIFAR-100 remains stable and sometimes superior to the original parametrization.

Layered image generation and editing is a fundamental capability that enables layer-wise reuse, editing, and composition of generated visual content, analogous to word-level editing in natural language. Despite its importance, this remains an underexplored area at scale. To address this gap, we present MRT, a 20B-parameter masked region diffusion model tailored for multi-layer transparent image generation and editing, trained on over 10M multilingual design samples spanning diverse aspect ratios and textual prompts. To fully leverage this scale, we make two key technical contributions. First, we unify three complementary tasks including text-to-layers, image-to-layers, and layers-to-layers within a shared masked region diffusion framework, where selective token masking enables flexible layer-wise generation and editing. Second, to enable overflow layer generation, we introduce an overflow-aware canvas layer that handles boundary inconsistencies and supports semi-transparent background synthesis, enabling complete editable layers extending beyond visible canvas boundaries. Additionally, we apply diffusion distillation to achieve 8-step, real-time multi-layer generation with minimal quality degradation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework substantially outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, including various commercial systems, across all three tasks, establishing a new benchmark for multi-layer transparent image generation. Notably, our model significantly outperforms the concurrent Qwen-Image-Layered model in image-to-layers quality according to user-study results, while achieving 10-100\times faster inference and reducing activation GPU memory consumption by 50-90\% during image-to-layer inference.

Gate set tomography (GST) is a protocol for detailed, predictive characterization of logic operations (gates) on quantum computing processors. Early versions of GST emerged around 2012-13, and since then it has been refined, demonstrated, and used in a large number of experiments. This paper presents the foundations of GST in comprehensive detail. The most important feature of GST, compared to older state and process tomography protocols, is that it is calibration-free. GST does not rely on pre-calibrated state preparations and measurements. Instead, it characterizes all the operations in a gate set simultaneously and self-consistently, relative to each other. Long sequence GST can estimate gates with very high precision and efficiency, achieving Heisenberg scaling in regimes of practical interest. In this paper, we cover GST's intellectual history, the techniques and experiments used to achieve its intended purpose, data analysis, gauge freedom and fixing, error bars, and the interpretation of gauge-fixed estimates of gate sets. Our focus is fundamental mathematical aspects of GST, rather than implementation details, but we touch on some of the foundational algorithmic tricks used in the pyGSTi implementation.

In this paper, we address post-training quantization (PTQ) for large language models (LLMs) from an overlooked perspective: given a pre-trained high-precision LLM, the predominant sequential quantization framework treats different layers equally, but this may be not optimal in challenging bit-width settings. We empirically study the quantization impact of different layers on model accuracy, and observe that: (1) shallow/deep layers are usually more sensitive to quantization than intermediate layers; (2) among shallow/deep layers, the most sensitive one is the first/last layer, which exhibits significantly larger quantization error than others. These empirical observations imply that the quantization design for different layers of LLMs is required on multiple levels instead of a single level shared to all layers. Motivated by this, we propose a new PTQ framework termed Sliding-layer Quantization (SliderQuant) that relies on a simple adaptive sliding quantization concept facilitated by few learnable parameters. The base component of SliderQuant is called inter-layer sliding quantization, which incorporates three types of novel sliding window designs tailored for addressing the varying quantization sensitivity of shallow, intermediate and deep layers. The other component is called intra-layer sliding quantization that leverages an incremental strategy to quantize each window. As a result, SliderQuant has a strong ability to reduce quantization errors across layers. Extensive experiments on basic language generation, zero-shot commonsense reasoning and challenging math and code tasks with various LLMs, including Llama/Llama2/Llama3/Qwen2.5 model families, DeepSeek-R1 distilled models and large MoE models, show that our method outperforms existing PTQ methods (including the latest PTQ methods using rotation transformations) for both weight-only quantization and weight-activation quantization.

Properties such as composability and automatic differentiation made artificial neural networks a pervasive tool in applications. Tackling more challenging problems caused neural networks to progressively become more complex and thus difficult to define from a mathematical perspective. We present a general definition of linear layer arising from a categorical framework based on the notions of integration theory and parametric spans. This definition generalizes and encompasses classical layers (e.g., dense, convolutional), while guaranteeing existence and computability of the layer's derivatives for backpropagation.

Efficient key-value (KV) cache management is crucial for the practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), yet existing compression techniques often incur a trade-off between performance degradation and computational overhead. We propose a novel gating-based KV cache eviction method for frozen-weight LLMs that achieves high compression ratios with negligible computational cost. Our approach introduces lightweight sink-attention gating modules to identify and retain critical KV pairs, and integrates seamlessly into both the prefill and decoding stages. The proposed gate training algorithm relies on forward passes of an LLM, avoiding expensive backpropagation, while achieving strong task generalization through a task-agnostic reconstruction objective. Extensive experiments across the Qwen2.5-1M, Qwen3, and Gemma3 families show that our method maintains near-lossless performance while evicting up to 70% of the KV cache. The results are consistent across a wide range of tasks, including long-context understanding, code comprehension, and mathematical reasoning, demonstrating the generality of our approach.

Recent diffusion-based approaches have made substantial progress in image layer decomposition. However, accurately decomposing complex natural images remains challenging due to difficulties in occlusion completion, robust layer disentanglement, and precise foreground boundaries. Moreover, the scarcity of high-quality multi-layer natural image datasets limits advancement. To address these challenges, we propose RevealLayer, a diffusion-based framework that decomposes an RGB image into multiple RGBA layers, enabling precise layer separation and reliable recovery of occluded content in natural images. RevealLayer incorporates three key components: (1) a Region-Aware Attention module to disentangle hidden and visible layers; (2) an Occlusion-Guided Adapter to leverage contextual information to enhance overlapping regions; and (3) a composite loss to enforce sharp alpha boundaries and suppress residual artifacts. To support training and evaluation, we introduce RevealLayer-100K, a high-quality multi-layer natural image constructed through a collaboration between automated algorithms and human annotation, and further establish RevealLayerBench for benchmarking layer decomposition in general natural scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RevealLayer consistently outperforms existing approaches in layer decomposition.

The loss landscapes of neural networks contain minima and saddle points that may be connected in flat regions or appear in isolation. We identify and characterize a special structure in the loss landscape: channels along which the loss decreases extremely slowly, while the output weights of at least two neurons, a_i and a_j, diverge to pminfinity, and their input weight vectors, w_i and w_j, become equal to each other. At convergence, the two neurons implement a gated linear unit: a_iσ(w_i cdot x) + a_jσ(w_j cdot x) rightarrow σ(w cdot x) + (v cdot x) σ'(w cdot x). Geometrically, these channels to infinity are asymptotically parallel to symmetry-induced lines of critical points. Gradient flow solvers, and related optimization methods like SGD or ADAM, reach the channels with high probability in diverse regression settings, but without careful inspection they look like flat local minima with finite parameter values. Our characterization provides a comprehensive picture of these quasi-flat regions in terms of gradient dynamics, geometry, and functional interpretation. The emergence of gated linear units at the end of the channels highlights a surprising aspect of the computational capabilities of fully connected layers.

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods such as adapt large pretrained models by adding small weight-space updates. While effective, weight deltas are hard to interpret mechanistically, and they do not directly expose which internal computations are reused versus bypassed for a new task. We explore an alternative view inspired by neuromodulation: adaptation as a change in mode -- selecting and rescaling existing computations -- rather than rewriting the underlying weights. We propose , a simple activation-space PEFT technique that freezes base weights and learns per-neuron thresholds and gains. During training, a smooth gate decides whether a neuron's activation participates; at inference the gate can be hardened to yield explicit conditional computation and neuron-level attributions. As a proof of concept, we study ``mode specialization'' on MNIST (0^circ) versus rotated MNIST (45^circ). We pretrain a small MLP on a 50/50 mixture (foundation), freeze its weights, and then specialize to the rotated mode using . Across seeds, improves rotated accuracy over the frozen baseline while using only a few hundred trainable parameters per layer, and exhibits partial activation sparsity (a minority of units strongly active). Compared to , trades some accuracy for substantially fewer trainable parameters and a more interpretable ``which-neurons-fire'' mechanism. We discuss limitations, including reduced expressivity when the frozen base lacks features needed for the target mode.

Gated Linear Units (arXiv:1612.08083) consist of the component-wise product of two linear projections, one of which is first passed through a sigmoid function. Variations on GLU are possible, using different nonlinear (or even linear) functions in place of sigmoid. We test these variants in the feed-forward sublayers of the Transformer (arXiv:1706.03762) sequence-to-sequence model, and find that some of them yield quality improvements over the typically-used ReLU or GELU activations.

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices is fundamentally constrained by the "Memory Wall" -- a hardware limitation where memory bandwidth, not compute, becomes the bottleneck. Recent 1.58-bit quantization techniques (e.g., BitNet b1.58) dramatically reduce memory footprint but typically incur a perplexity degradation of 20-25% compared to FP16 baselines. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Gated Flow (HGF), a dual-stream architecture that couples a 1.58-bit ternary backbone with a learnable, low-rank FP16 correction path controlled by adaptive gates. Through extensive experiments on the TinyStories dataset across two training regimes (2500 and 3500 steps), we demonstrate that HGF 5.4 achieves a validation loss of 0.9306 compared to BitNet's 1.0294, recovering approximately 55% of the quality gap between pure ternary quantization and the FP16 baseline (0.8490). This recovery is achieved with only ~12-15% memory overhead beyond the ternary backbone. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence for an emergent phenomenon: quantization as structural regularization. While a full-precision differential attention baseline (Diff_Only) exhibited training instability with validation loss exceeding 1.68, the ternary-anchored HGF maintained robust convergence throughout training. Finally, we report preliminary results extending this architecture to 1.2B and 3B parameter models trained on SlimPajama and FineWeb-Edu. These larger-scale experiments confirm that the architectural stability and quality recovery observed in small-scale proxies scale linearly to production-grade language modeling regimes.

For any positive integer k, there exist neural networks with Θ(k^3) layers, Θ(1) nodes per layer, and Θ(1) distinct parameters which can not be approximated by networks with O(k) layers unless they are exponentially large --- they must possess Ω(2^k) nodes. This result is proved here for a class of nodes termed "semi-algebraic gates" which includes the common choices of ReLU, maximum, indicator, and piecewise polynomial functions, therefore establishing benefits of depth against not just standard networks with ReLU gates, but also convolutional networks with ReLU and maximization gates, sum-product networks, and boosted decision trees (in this last case with a stronger separation: Ω(2^{k^3}) total tree nodes are required).

Recent advances in language modeling have demonstrated the effectiveness of State Space Models (SSMs) for efficient sequence modeling. While hybrid architectures such as Samba and the decoder-decoder architecture, YOCO, have shown promising performance gains over Transformers, prior works have not investigated the efficiency potential of representation sharing between SSM layers. In this paper, we introduce the Gated Memory Unit (GMU), a simple yet effective mechanism for efficient memory sharing across layers. We apply it to create SambaY, a decoder-hybrid-decoder architecture that incorporates GMUs in the cross-decoder to share memory readout states from a Samba-based self-decoder. SambaY significantly enhances decoding efficiency, preserves linear pre-filling time complexity, and boosts long-context performance, all while eliminating the need for explicit positional encoding. Through extensive scaling experiments, we demonstrate that our model exhibits a significantly lower irreducible loss compared to a strong YOCO baseline, indicating superior performance scalability under large-scale compute regimes. Our largest model enhanced with Differential Attention, Phi4-mini-Flash-Reasoning, achieves significantly better performance than Phi4-mini-Reasoning on reasoning tasks such as Math500, AIME24/25, and GPQA Diamond without any reinforcement learning, while delivering up to 10x higher decoding throughput on 2K-length prompts with 32K generation length under the vLLM inference framework. We release our training codebase on open-source data at https://github.com/microsoft/ArchScale.

Animated video separates foreground and background elements into layers, with distinct processes for sketching, refining, coloring, and in-betweening. Existing video generation methods typically treat animation as a monolithic data domain, lacking fine-grained control over individual layers. In this paper, we introduce LayerAnimate, a novel architectural approach that enhances fine-grained control over individual animation layers within a video diffusion model, allowing users to independently manipulate foreground and background elements in distinct layers. To address the challenge of limited layer-specific data, we propose a data curation pipeline that features automated element segmentation, motion-state hierarchical merging, and motion coherence refinement. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, and user study, we demonstrate that LayerAnimate outperforms current methods in terms of animation quality, control precision, and usability, making it an ideal tool for both professional animators and amateur enthusiasts. This framework opens up new possibilities for layer-specific animation applications and creative flexibility. Our code is available at https://layeranimate.github.io.

Rich feature representations derived from CLIP-ViT have been widely utilized in AI-generated image detection. While most existing methods primarily leverage features from the final layer, we systematically analyze the contributions of layer-wise features to this task. Our study reveals that earlier layers provide more localized and generalizable features, often surpassing the performance of final-layer features in detection tasks. Moreover, we find that different layers capture distinct aspects of the data, each contributing uniquely to AI-generated image detection. Motivated by these findings, we introduce a novel adaptive method, termed MoLD, which dynamically integrates features from multiple ViT layers using a gating-based mechanism. Extensive experiments on both GAN- and diffusion-generated images demonstrate that MoLD significantly improves detection performance, enhances generalization across diverse generative models, and exhibits robustness in real-world scenarios. Finally, we illustrate the scalability and versatility of our approach by successfully applying it to other pre-trained ViTs, such as DINOv2.

The ability to dynamically adjust the computational load of neural models during inference in a resource aware manner is crucial for on-device processing scenarios, characterised by limited and time-varying computational resources. Early-exit architectures represent an elegant and effective solution, since they can process the input with a subset of their layers, exiting at intermediate branches (the upmost layers are hence removed from the model). From a different perspective, for automatic speech recognition applications there are memory-efficient neural architectures that apply variable frame rate analysis, through downsampling/upsampling operations in the middle layers, reducing the overall number of operations and improving significantly the performance on well established benchmarks. One example is the Zipformer. However, these architectures lack the modularity necessary to inject early-exit branches. With the aim of improving the performance in early-exit models, we propose introducing parallel layers in the architecture that process downsampled versions of their inputs. % in conjunction with standard processing layers. We show that in this way the speech recognition performance on standard benchmarks significantly improve, at the cost of a small increase in the overall number of model parameters but without affecting the inference time.

Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to transform the non-linearly separable input data into more linearly separable abstract features using a hierarchy of layers. These layers are combinations of linear and nonlinear functions. The most popular and common non-linearity layers are activation functions (AFs), such as Logistic Sigmoid, Tanh, ReLU, ELU, Swish and Mish. In this paper, a comprehensive overview and survey is presented for AFs in neural networks for deep learning. Different classes of AFs such as Logistic Sigmoid and Tanh based, ReLU based, ELU based, and Learning based are covered. Several characteristics of AFs such as output range, monotonicity, and smoothness are also pointed out. A performance comparison is also performed among 18 state-of-the-art AFs with different networks on different types of data. The insights of AFs are presented to benefit the researchers for doing further research and practitioners to select among different choices. The code used for experimental comparison is released at: https://github.com/shivram1987/ActivationFunctions.

Self-supervised speech (SSL) models have recently become widely adopted for many downstream speech processing tasks. The general usage pattern is to employ SSL models as feature extractors, and then train a downstream prediction head to solve a specific task. However, different layers of SSL models have been shown to capture different types of information, and the methods of combining them are not well studied. To this end, we extend the general framework for SSL model utilization by proposing the interface that connects the upstream and downstream. Under this view, the dominant technique of combining features via a layerwise weighted sum can be regarded as a specific interface. We propose several alternative interface designs and demonstrate that the weighted sum interface is suboptimal for many tasks. In particular, we show that a convolutional interface whose depth scales logarithmically with the depth of the upstream model consistently outperforms many other interface designs.

We view large language models (LLMs) as stochastic language layers in a network, where the learnable parameters are the natural language prompts at each layer. We stack two such layers, feeding the output of one layer to the next. We call the stacked architecture a Deep Language Network (DLN). We first show how to effectively perform prompt optimization for a 1-Layer language network (DLN-1). We then show how to train 2-layer DLNs (DLN-2), where two prompts must be learnt. We consider the output of the first layer as a latent variable to marginalize, and devise a variational inference algorithm for joint prompt training. A DLN-2 reaches higher performance than a single layer, sometimes comparable to few-shot GPT-4 even when each LLM in the network is smaller and less powerful. The DLN code is open source: https://github.com/microsoft/deep-language-networks .

Few algorithms for supervised training of spiking neural networks exist that can deal with patterns of multiple spikes, and their computational properties are largely unexplored. We demonstrate in a set of simulations that the ReSuMe learning algorithm can be successfully applied to layered neural networks. Input and output patterns are encoded as spike trains of multiple precisely timed spikes, and the network learns to transform the input trains into target output trains. This is done by combining the ReSuMe learning algorithm with multiplicative scaling of the connections of downstream neurons. We show in particular that layered networks with one hidden layer can learn the basic logical operations, including Exclusive-Or, while networks without hidden layer cannot, mirroring an analogous result for layered networks of rate neurons. While supervised learning in spiking neural networks is not yet fit for technical purposes, exploring computational properties of spiking neural networks advances our understanding of how computations can be done with spike trains.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extensively employed in safety-critical applications where ensuring hardware reliability is a primary concern. To enhance the reliability of DNNs against hardware faults, activation restriction techniques significantly mitigate the fault effects at the DNN structure level, irrespective of accelerator architectures. State-of-the-art methods offer either neuron-wise or layer-wise clipping activation functions. They attempt to determine optimal clipping thresholds using heuristic and learning-based approaches. Layer-wise clipped activation functions cannot preserve DNNs resilience at high bit error rates. On the other hand, neuron-wise clipping activation functions introduce considerable memory overhead due to the addition of parameters, which increases their vulnerability to faults. Moreover, the heuristic-based optimization approach demands numerous fault injections during the search process, resulting in time-consuming threshold identification. On the other hand, learning-based techniques that train thresholds for entire layers concurrently often yield sub-optimal results. In this work, first, we demonstrate that it is not essential to incorporate neuron-wise activation functions throughout all layers in DNNs. Then, we propose a hybrid clipped activation function that integrates neuron-wise and layer-wise methods that apply neuron-wise clipping only in the last layer of DNNs. Additionally, to attain optimal thresholds in the clipping activation function, we introduce ProAct, a progressive training methodology. This approach iteratively trains the thresholds on a layer-by-layer basis, aiming to obtain optimal threshold values in each layer separately.

Trainable layers such as convolutional building blocks are the standard network design choices by learning parameters to capture the global context through successive spatial operations. When designing an efficient network, trainable layers such as the depthwise convolution is the source of efficiency in the number of parameters and FLOPs, but there was little improvement to the model speed in practice. This paper argues that simple built-in parameter-free operations can be a favorable alternative to the efficient trainable layers replacing spatial operations in a network architecture. We aim to break the stereotype of organizing the spatial operations of building blocks into trainable layers. Extensive experimental analyses based on layer-level studies with fully-trained models and neural architecture searches are provided to investigate whether parameter-free operations such as the max-pool are functional. The studies eventually give us a simple yet effective idea for redesigning network architectures, where the parameter-free operations are heavily used as the main building block without sacrificing the model accuracy as much. Experimental results on the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that the network architectures with parameter-free operations could enjoy the advantages of further efficiency in terms of model speed, the number of the parameters, and FLOPs. Code and ImageNet pretrained models are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/PfLayer.

Vision transformer based models bring significant improvements for image segmentation tasks. Although these architectures offer powerful capabilities irrespective of specific segmentation tasks, their use of computational resources can be taxing on deployed devices. One way to overcome this challenge is by adapting the computation level to the specific needs of the input image rather than the current one-size-fits-all approach. To this end, we introduce ECO-M2F or EffiCient TransfOrmer Encoders for Mask2Former-style models. Noting that the encoder module of M2F-style models incur high resource-intensive computations, ECO-M2F provides a strategy to self-select the number of hidden layers in the encoder, conditioned on the input image. To enable this self-selection ability for providing a balance between performance and computational efficiency, we present a three step recipe. The first step is to train the parent architecture to enable early exiting from the encoder. The second step is to create an derived dataset of the ideal number of encoder layers required for each training example. The third step is to use the aforementioned derived dataset to train a gating network that predicts the number of encoder layers to be used, conditioned on the input image. Additionally, to change the computational-accuracy tradeoff, only steps two and three need to be repeated which significantly reduces retraining time. Experiments on the public datasets show that the proposed approach reduces expected encoder computational cost while maintaining performance, adapts to various user compute resources, is flexible in architecture configurations, and can be extended beyond the segmentation task to object detection.

Understanding the structure and function of circuits is crucial for electronic design automation (EDA). Circuits can be formulated as And-Inverter graphs (AIGs), enabling efficient implementation of representation learning through graph neural networks (GNNs). Masked modeling paradigms have been proven effective in graph representation learning. However, masking augmentation to original circuits will destroy their logical equivalence, which is unsuitable for circuit representation learning. Moreover, existing masked modeling paradigms often prioritize structural information at the expense of abstract information such as circuit function. To address these limitations, we introduce MGVGA, a novel constrained masked modeling paradigm incorporating masked gate modeling (MGM) and Verilog-AIG alignment (VGA). Specifically, MGM preserves logical equivalence by masking gates in the latent space rather than in the original circuits, subsequently reconstructing the attributes of these masked gates. Meanwhile, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated an excellent understanding of the Verilog code functionality. Building upon this capability, VGA performs masking operations on original circuits and reconstructs masked gates under the constraints of equivalent Verilog codes, enabling GNNs to learn circuit functions from LLMs. We evaluate MGVGA on various logic synthesis tasks for EDA and show the superior performance of MGVGA compared to previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/MGVGA.

In contrast to RNNs, which compress previous tokens into a single hidden state, Transformers can attend to all previous tokens directly. However, standard Transformers only use representations from the immediately preceding layer. In this paper, we show that this design choice causes representation collapse and leads to suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we introduce Layer-Integrated Memory (LIMe), a simple yet powerful approach that preserves the model's overall memory footprint while expanding its representational capacity by allowing access to hidden states from earlier layers. Through extensive experiments across various architectures and different lookup mechanisms, we demonstrate consistent performance improvements on a wide range of tasks. Moreover, our analysis of the learned representation dynamics and our exploration of depthwise circuits reveal how LIMe integrates information across layers, pointing to promising directions for future research.

We present an attention mechanism inspired from definition of screened Coulomb potential. This attention mechanism was used to interpret the Graph Attention (GAT) model layers and training dataset by using a flexible and scalable framework (CoulGAT) developed for this purpose. Using CoulGAT, a forest of plain and resnet models were trained and characterized using this attention mechanism against CHAMPS dataset. The learnable variables of the attention mechanism are used to extract node-node and node-feature interactions to define an empirical standard model for the graph structure and hidden layer. This representation of graph and hidden layers can be used as a tool to compare different models, optimize hidden layers and extract a compact definition of graph structure of the dataset.

Logical reasoning is central to complex human activities, such as thinking, debating, and planning; it is also a central component of many AI systems as well. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which encoder-only transformer language models (LMs) can reason according to logical rules. We ask whether those LMs can deduce theorems in propositional calculus and first-order logic; if their relative success in these problems reflects general logical capabilities; and which layers contribute the most to the task. First, we show for several encoder-only LMs that they can be trained, to a reasonable degree, to determine logical validity on various datasets. Next, by cross-probing fine-tuned models on these datasets, we show that LMs have difficulty in transferring their putative logical reasoning ability, which suggests that they may have learned dataset-specific features, instead of a general capability. Finally, we conduct a layerwise probing experiment, which shows that the hypothesis classification task is mostly solved through higher layers.

In this paper, we describe a design of a mixed signal circuit for a binary neuron (a.k.a perceptron, threshold logic gate) and a methodology for automatically embedding such cells in ASICs. The binary neuron, referred to as an FTL (flash threshold logic) uses floating gate or flash transistors whose threshold voltages serve as a proxy for the weights of the neuron. Algorithms for mapping the weights to the flash transistor threshold voltages are presented. The threshold voltages are determined to maximize both the robustness of the cell and its speed. The performance, power, and area of a single FTL cell are shown to be significantly smaller (79.4%), consume less power (61.6%), and operate faster (40.3%) compared to conventional CMOS logic equivalents. Also included are the architecture and the algorithms to program the flash devices of an FTL. The FTL cells are implemented as standard cells, and are designed to allow commercial synthesis and P&R tools to automatically use them in synthesis of ASICs. Substantial reductions in area and power without sacrificing performance are demonstrated on several ASIC benchmarks by the automatic embedding of FTL cells. The paper also demonstrates how FTL cells can be used for fixing timing errors after fabrication.

Recent advancements in large generative models, particularly diffusion-based methods, have significantly enhanced the capabilities of image editing. However, achieving precise control over image composition tasks remains a challenge. Layered representations, which allow for independent editing of image components, are essential for user-driven content creation, yet existing approaches often struggle to decompose image into plausible layers with accurately retained transparent visual effects such as shadows and reflections. We propose LayerDecomp, a generative framework for image layer decomposition which outputs photorealistic clean backgrounds and high-quality transparent foregrounds with faithfully preserved visual effects. To enable effective training, we first introduce a dataset preparation pipeline that automatically scales up simulated multi-layer data with synthesized visual effects. To further enhance real-world applicability, we supplement this simulated dataset with camera-captured images containing natural visual effects. Additionally, we propose a consistency loss which enforces the model to learn accurate representations for the transparent foreground layer when ground-truth annotations are not available. Our method achieves superior quality in layer decomposition, outperforming existing approaches in object removal and spatial editing tasks across several benchmarks and multiple user studies, unlocking various creative possibilities for layer-wise image editing. The project page is https://rayjryang.github.io/LayerDecomp.

Activation functions are fundamental elements of deep learning architectures as they significantly influence training dynamics. ReLU, while widely used, is prone to the dying neuron problem, which has been mitigated by variants such as LeakyReLU, PReLU, and ELU that better handle negative neuron outputs. Recently, self-gated activations like GELU and Swish have emerged as state-of-the-art alternatives, leveraging their smoothness to ensure stable gradient flow and prevent neuron inactivity. In this work, we introduce the Gompertz Linear Unit (GoLU), a novel self-gated activation function defined as GoLU(x) = x , Gompertz(x), where Gompertz(x) = e^{-e^{-x}}. The GoLU activation leverages the asymmetry in the Gompertz function to reduce variance in the latent space more effectively compared to GELU and Swish, while preserving robust gradient flow. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including Image Classification, Language Modeling, Semantic Segmentation, Object Detection, Instance Segmentation, and Diffusion, highlight GoLU's superior performance relative to state-of-the-art activation functions, establishing GoLU as a robust alternative to existing activation functions.

In this paper, we present a novel framework for enhancing the performance of Quanvolutional Neural Networks (QuNNs) by introducing trainable quanvolutional layers and addressing the critical challenges associated with them. Traditional quanvolutional layers, although beneficial for feature extraction, have largely been static, offering limited adaptability. Unlike state-of-the-art, our research overcomes this limitation by enabling training within these layers, significantly increasing the flexibility and potential of QuNNs. However, the introduction of multiple trainable quanvolutional layers induces complexities in gradient-based optimization, primarily due to the difficulty in accessing gradients across these layers. To resolve this, we propose a novel architecture, Residual Quanvolutional Neural Networks (ResQuNNs), leveraging the concept of residual learning, which facilitates the flow of gradients by adding skip connections between layers. By inserting residual blocks between quanvolutional layers, we ensure enhanced gradient access throughout the network, leading to improved training performance. Moreover, we provide empirical evidence on the strategic placement of these residual blocks within QuNNs. Through extensive experimentation, we identify an efficient configuration of residual blocks, which enables gradients across all the layers in the network that eventually results in efficient training. Our findings suggest that the precise location of residual blocks plays a crucial role in maximizing the performance gains in QuNNs. Our results mark a substantial step forward in the evolution of quantum deep learning, offering new avenues for both theoretical development and practical quantum computing applications.

Hybrid attention models improve long-context efficiency by retaining only a subset of full-attention layers and replacing the remaining layers with linear attention. However, the effectiveness of Transformer-to-hybrid conversion critically depends on which layers preserve full attention. Existing hybrid layer selection methods typically rely on heuristic strategies such as fixed placement patterns or layerwise scoring, implicitly treating layer importance as isolated and overlooking the interdependent layer effect under a global hybrid configuration. In this work, we formulate hybrid layer selection as a budget-constrained subset optimization problem. We further propose FlashMorph (Fast LAyer Selection for Hybrid MORPHing), an effective, efficient and scalable layer selection method for Transformer-to-hybrid conversion. FlashMorph first constructs a morphable model by equipping each full-attention layer with a converted linear-attention branch. It then freezes all model weights and jointly optimizes layerwise gates on synthetic long-context retrieval data, with a linearization regularization that encourages the model to rely on linear attention for efficiency. The learned gates are discretized under a preset full-attention budget to instantiate the hybrid architecture, followed by standard logits distillation and long-context finetuning. Extensive experiments show that FlashMorph discovers more effective hybrid configurations, preserves strong long-context recall and general benchmark performance while substantially reducing layer selection cost compared with existing layer selection methods, demonstrating its effectiveness, efficiency, and scalability.

Media design layer generation enables the creation of fully editable, layered design documents such as posters, flyers, and logos using only natural language prompts. Existing methods either restrict outputs to a fixed number of layers or require each layer to contain only spatially continuous regions, causing the layer count to scale linearly with design complexity. We propose LaDe (Layered Media Design), a latent diffusion framework that generates a flexible number of semantically meaningful layers. LaDe combines three components: an LLM-based prompt expander that transforms a short user intent into structured per-layer descriptions that guide the generation, a Latent Diffusion Transformer with a 4D RoPE positional encoding mechanism that jointly generates the full media design and its constituent RGBA layers, and an RGBA VAE that decodes each layer with full alpha-channel support. By conditioning on layer samples during training, our unified framework supports three tasks: text-to-image generation, text-to-layers media design generation, and media design decomposition. We compare LaDe to Qwen-Image-Layered on text-to-layers and image-to-layers tasks on the Crello test set. LaDe outperforms Qwen-Image-Layered in text-to-layers generation by improving text-to-layer alignment, as validated by two VLM-as-a-judge evaluators (GPT-4o mini and Qwen3-VL).

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of gating. In this work, we conduct comprehensive experiments to systematically investigate gating-augmented softmax attention variants. Specifically, we perform a comprehensive comparison over 30 variants of 15B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models and 1.7B dense models trained on a 3.5 trillion token dataset. Our central finding is that a simple modification-applying a head-specific sigmoid gate after the Scaled Dot-Product Attention (SDPA)-consistently improves performance. This modification also enhances training stability, tolerates larger learning rates, and improves scaling properties. By comparing various gating positions and computational variants, we attribute this effectiveness to two key factors: (1) introducing non-linearity upon the low-rank mapping in the softmax attention, and (2) applying query-dependent sparse gating scores to modulate the SDPA output. Notably, we find this sparse gating mechanism mitigates 'attention sink' and enhances long-context extrapolation performance, and we also release related https://github.com/qiuzh20/gated_attention{codes} and https://huggingface.co/QwQZh/gated_attention{models} to facilitate future research.

We compress KV cache entries by quantizing angles in the Fast Walsh-Hadamard domain, where a random diagonal rotation makes consecutive element pairs approximately uniformly distributed on the unit circle. We extend this angular quantizer with per-layer early-boost, which independently configures K and V codebook sizes at each layer, allocating higher precision to a model-specific subset of critical layers. Across seven models (1B to 7B parameters), per-layer early-boost achieves lossless compression on four models and near-lossless quality on six of seven, at 3.28 to 3.67 angle bits per element. Asymmetric norm quantization (8-bit for keys, 4-bit log-space for values) yields 6.56 total bits per element on Mistral-7B with perplexity degradation of +0.0014 and no calibration data. A layer-group sensitivity analysis reveals model-specific bottleneck patterns, including K-dominated versus V-dominated layers and negative-transfer layers where increased precision degrades quality.

The recent surge in high-quality visual instruction tuning samples from closed-source vision-language models (VLMs) such as GPT-4V has accelerated the release of open-source VLMs across various model sizes. However, scaling VLMs to improve performance using larger models brings significant computational challenges, especially for deployment on resource-constrained devices like mobile platforms and robots. To address this, we propose VLsI: Verbalized Layers-to-Interactions, a new VLM family in 2B and 7B model sizes, which prioritizes efficiency without compromising accuracy. VLsI leverages a unique, layer-wise distillation process, introducing intermediate "verbalizers" that map features from each layer to natural language space, allowing smaller VLMs to flexibly align with the reasoning processes of larger VLMs. This approach mitigates the training instability often encountered in output imitation and goes beyond typical final-layer tuning by aligning the small VLMs' layer-wise progression with that of the large ones. We validate VLsI across ten challenging vision-language benchmarks, achieving notable performance gains (11.0% for 2B and 17.4% for 7B) over GPT-4V without the need for model scaling, merging, or architectural changes.

Layer-wise distillation is a powerful tool to compress large models (i.e. teacher models) into small ones (i.e., student models). The student distills knowledge from the teacher by mimicking the hidden representations of the teacher at every intermediate layer. However, layer-wise distillation is difficult. Since the student has a smaller model capacity than the teacher, it is often under-fitted. Furthermore, the hidden representations of the teacher contain redundant information that the student does not necessarily need for the target task's learning. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Task-aware layEr-wise Distillation (TED). TED designs task-aware filters to align the hidden representations of the student and the teacher at each layer. The filters select the knowledge that is useful for the target task from the hidden representations. As such, TED reduces the knowledge gap between the two models and helps the student to fit better on the target task. We evaluate TED in two scenarios: continual pre-training and fine-tuning. TED demonstrates significant and consistent improvements over existing distillation methods in both scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/cliang1453/task-aware-distillation.

Layer-aligned distillation and convergence-based early exit represent two predominant computational efficiency paradigms for transformer inference; yet we establish that they exhibit systematic incompatibility under standard deployment conditions for convergence-based early exit. Distillation objectives that align intermediate student layers to teacher representations suppress the representational convergence that early-exit mechanisms exploit, rendering such mechanisms ineffective on distilled models. We introduce LEAP (Layer-wise Exit-Aware Pretraining), an auxiliary training objective that reconciles this incompatibility. LEAP requires no architectural modifications; it augments standard distillation with a single constraint ensuring intermediate layers approximate final-layer representations. LEAP-MiniLM achieves 1.61times measured wall-clock speedup (batch=1, NVIDIA L4) at θ=0.95, with 91.9% of samples exiting by layer 7 and 1.80times theoretical layer reduction, where standard distilled models achieve zero effective speedup. We validate across sentence similarity (STS-B: 0.760 pm 0.006) and retrieval benchmarks (BEIR), providing operational guidance including latency measurements, decision thresholds, and deployment criteria.

The emergence of agent-to-agent communication protocols mirrors the early internet: powerful connectivity with minimal security infrastructure. When AI agents communicate on behalf of users, every message crosses a trust boundary where the user's personal data and the external agent's unconstrained language each present distinct risks. We address both through a dual-firewall architecture grounded in a unifying principle: each task defines a context, and both sides of the communication carry information far exceeding what that context requires. Our firewalls act as projections onto the task context, allowing only contextually appropriate content to cross each boundary. The Language Converter Firewall projects incoming messages onto a closed, domain-specific, structured protocol; an external agent's message is converted to validated fields while persuasive framing, urgency tactics, and embedded instructions are structurally eliminated through deterministic verification. This replaces the asymmetric challenge of resisting every possible manipulation with the structural guarantee that manipulation has no channel through which to arrive. The Data Abstraction Firewall projects outgoing information onto the granularity appropriate for the task, rather than applying binary disclose-or-redact filtering, as previous airgapping solutions did. Both firewalls operate in a trusted environment isolated from external input, applying domain-specific rules learned automatically from demonstrations. Across 864 attacks spanning three domains on the ConVerse benchmark, our architecture reduces privacy attack success rates (e.g., from 84% to 10% for GPT-5) and security attacks (from 60% to 3%), while maintaining or even improving task completion quality.

Diffusion models have advanced from text-to-image (T2I) to image-to-image (I2I) generation by incorporating structured inputs such as depth maps, enabling fine-grained spatial control. However, existing methods either train separate models for each condition or rely on unified architectures with entangled representations, resulting in poor generalization and high adaptation costs for novel conditions. To this end, we propose DivControl, a decomposable pretraining framework for unified controllable generation and efficient adaptation. DivControl factorizes ControlNet via SVD into basic components-pairs of singular vectors-which are disentangled into condition-agnostic learngenes and condition-specific tailors through knowledge diversion during multi-condition training. Knowledge diversion is implemented via a dynamic gate that performs soft routing over tailors based on the semantics of condition instructions, enabling zero-shot generalization and parameter-efficient adaptation to novel conditions. To further improve condition fidelity and training efficiency, we introduce a representation alignment loss that aligns condition embeddings with early diffusion features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DivControl achieves state-of-the-art controllability with 36.4times less training cost, while simultaneously improving average performance on basic conditions. It also delivers strong zero-shot and few-shot performance on unseen conditions, demonstrating superior scalability, modularity, and transferability.

Auto-regressive Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across different domains such as vision and language processing. However, due to sequential processing through a stack of transformer layers, autoregressive decoding faces significant computation/latency challenges, particularly in resource-constrained environments like mobile and edge devices. Existing approaches in literature that aim to improve latency via skipping layers have two distinct flavors - 1) Early exit, and 2) Input-agnostic heuristics where tokens exit at pre-determined layers irrespective of input sequence. Both the above strategies have limitations - the former cannot be applied to handle KV Caching necessary for speed-ups in modern framework and the latter does not capture the variation in layer importance across tasks or more generally, across input sequences. To address both limitations, we propose FiRST, an algorithm that reduces inference latency by using layer-specific routers to select a subset of transformer layers adaptively for each input sequence - the prompt (during the prefill stage) decides which layers will be skipped during decoding. FiRST preserves compatibility with KV caching enabling faster inference while being quality-aware. FiRST is model-agnostic and can be easily enabled on any pre-trained LLM. Our approach reveals that input adaptivity is critical - indeed, different task-specific middle layers play a crucial role in evolving hidden representations depending on tasks. Extensive experiments show that FiRST significantly reduces latency while outperforming other layer selection strategies in quality metics. It retains competitive performance to base model (without layer skipping) and in some cases, even improves upon it. FiRST is thus a promising and efficient solution for LLM deployment in low-resource environments.

Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention pattern, but under an Associative Memory interpretation, its difference-style update renders the training objective effectively unbounded. In contrast, Softmax attention normalizes updates, leading to memory shrinkage and gradient vanishing. We propose GatedFWA: a Memory-Gated (Flash) Windowed Attention mechanism that preserves SWAs efficiency while stabilizing memory updates and making gradient flow controllable. In essence, GatedFWA accumulate a per-token/head gate into a decay bias added to the attention logits, acting as a learnable contraction in the memory recurrence. We implement a fused one-pass gate preprocessing and a FlashAttention-compatible kernel that injects the gate under a sliding mask, ensuring I/O efficiency and numerical stability. On language modelling benchmarks, GatedFWA delivers competitive throughput with negligible overhead and better use of global context, and it integrates cleanly with token compression/selection methods such as NSA and generalizes to various autoregressive domains.

Visual recognition requires rich representations that span levels from low to high, scales from small to large, and resolutions from fine to coarse. Even with the depth of features in a convolutional network, a layer in isolation is not enough: compounding and aggregating these representations improves inference of what and where. Architectural efforts are exploring many dimensions for network backbones, designing deeper or wider architectures, but how to best aggregate layers and blocks across a network deserves further attention. Although skip connections have been incorporated to combine layers, these connections have been "shallow" themselves, and only fuse by simple, one-step operations. We augment standard architectures with deeper aggregation to better fuse information across layers. Our deep layer aggregation structures iteratively and hierarchically merge the feature hierarchy to make networks with better accuracy and fewer parameters. Experiments across architectures and tasks show that deep layer aggregation improves recognition and resolution compared to existing branching and merging schemes. The code is at https://github.com/ucbdrive/dla.

The Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture is showing promising results in improving parameter sharing in multi-task learning (MTL) and in scaling high-capacity neural networks. State-of-the-art MoE models use a trainable sparse gate to select a subset of the experts for each input example. While conceptually appealing, existing sparse gates, such as Top-k, are not smooth. The lack of smoothness can lead to convergence and statistical performance issues when training with gradient-based methods. In this paper, we develop DSelect-k: a continuously differentiable and sparse gate for MoE, based on a novel binary encoding formulation. The gate can be trained using first-order methods, such as stochastic gradient descent, and offers explicit control over the number of experts to select. We demonstrate the effectiveness of DSelect-k on both synthetic and real MTL datasets with up to 128 tasks. Our experiments indicate that DSelect-k can achieve statistically significant improvements in prediction and expert selection over popular MoE gates. Notably, on a real-world, large-scale recommender system, DSelect-k achieves over 22% improvement in predictive performance compared to Top-k. We provide an open-source implementation of DSelect-k.

Designing an efficient model within the limited computational cost is challenging. We argue the accuracy of a lightweight model has been further limited by the design convention: a stage-wise configuration of the channel dimensions, which looks like a piecewise linear function of the network stage. In this paper, we study an effective channel dimension configuration towards better performance than the convention. To this end, we empirically study how to design a single layer properly by analyzing the rank of the output feature. We then investigate the channel configuration of a model by searching network architectures concerning the channel configuration under the computational cost restriction. Based on the investigation, we propose a simple yet effective channel configuration that can be parameterized by the layer index. As a result, our proposed model following the channel parameterization achieves remarkable performance on ImageNet classification and transfer learning tasks including COCO object detection, COCO instance segmentation, and fine-grained classifications. Code and ImageNet pretrained models are available at https://github.com/clovaai/rexnet.

Linear Transformers have gained attention as efficient alternatives to standard Transformers, but their performance in retrieval and long-context tasks has been limited. To address these limitations, recent work has explored two distinct mechanisms: gating for adaptive memory control and the delta update rule for precise memory modifications. We observe that these mechanisms are complementary: gating enables rapid memory erasure while the delta rule facilitates targeted updates. Building on this insight, we introduce the gated delta rule and develop a parallel training algorithm optimized for modern hardware. Our proposed architecture, Gated DeltaNet, consistently surpasses existing models like Mamba2 and DeltaNet across multiple benchmarks, including language modeling, common-sense reasoning, in-context retrieval, length extrapolation, and long-context understanding. We further enhance performance by developing hybrid architectures that combine Gated DeltaNet layers with sliding window attention or Mamba2 layers, achieving both improved training efficiency and superior task performance.

As giant dense models advance quality but require large amounts of GPU budgets for training, the sparsely gated Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), a kind of conditional computation architecture, is proposed to scale models while keeping their computation constant. Specifically, the input tokens are routed by the gate network and only activates part of the expert network. Existing MoE training systems only support part of mainstream MoE models (e.g. Top k) training under expensive high-bandwidth GPU clusters. In this paper, we present HetuMoE, a high-performance large-scale sparse MoE training system built on Hetu. HetuMoE provides multiple gating strategies and efficient GPU kernel implementations. To further improve the training efficiency on commodity GPU clusters (e.g, with only 1 NiC), we introduce the hierarchical AllToAll communication that combines hierarchical networks and aggregating messages. Compared with existing state-of-the-art MoE systems, HetuMoE obtains at least 15% speedup. Specifically, HetuMoE outperforms DeepSpeed-MoE up to 8.1x under the switch gate with a batch size of 32. Our code is available at: https://github.com/PKU-DAIR/Hetu.

We report a mixture of expert strategy to create fine-tuned large language models using a deep layer-wise token-level approach based on low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Starting with a set of pre-trained LoRA adapters, we propose a gating strategy that uses the hidden states to dynamically mix adapted layers, allowing the resulting X-LoRA model to draw upon different capabilities and create never-before-used deep layer-wise combinations of adaptations are established to solve specific tasks. The design is inspired by the biological principles of universality and diversity, where neural network building blocks are reused in different hierarchical manifestations. Hence, the X-LoRA model can be easily implemented for any existing large language model (LLM) without a need for modifications of the underlying structure. We develop a tailored X-LoRA model that offers scientific capabilities including forward/inverse analysis tasks and enhanced reasoning capability, focused on biomaterial analysis, protein mechanics and design. The impact of this work include access to readily expandable, adaptable and changeable models with strong domain knowledge and the capability to integrate across areas of knowledge. With the X-LoRA model featuring experts in biology, mathematics, reasoning, bio-inspired materials, mechanics and materials, chemistry, and protein mechanics we conduct a series of physics-focused case studies. We examine knowledge recall, protein mechanics forward/inverse tasks, protein design, and adversarial agentic modeling including ontological knowledge graphs. The model is capable not only of making quantitative predictions of nanomechanical properties of proteins, but also reasons over the results and correctly predicts likely mechanisms that explain distinct molecular behaviors.

While it is still unclear if agents with Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could ever be built, we can already use mathematical models to investigate potential safety systems for these agents. We present an AGI safety layer that creates a special dedicated input terminal to support the iterative improvement of an AGI agent's utility function. The humans who switched on the agent can use this terminal to close any loopholes that are discovered in the utility function's encoding of agent goals and constraints, to direct the agent towards new goals, or to force the agent to switch itself off. An AGI agent may develop the emergent incentive to manipulate the above utility function improvement process, for example by deceiving, restraining, or even attacking the humans involved. The safety layer will partially, and sometimes fully, suppress this dangerous incentive. The first part of this paper generalizes earlier work on AGI emergency stop buttons. We aim to make the mathematical methods used to construct the layer more accessible, by applying them to an MDP model. We discuss two provable properties of the safety layer, and show ongoing work in mapping it to a Causal Influence Diagram (CID). In the second part, we develop full mathematical proofs, and show that the safety layer creates a type of bureaucratic blindness. We then present the design of a learning agent, a design that wraps the safety layer around either a known machine learning system, or a potential future AGI-level learning system. The resulting agent will satisfy the provable safety properties from the moment it is first switched on. Finally, we show how this agent can be mapped from its model to a real-life implementation. We review the methodological issues involved in this step, and discuss how these are typically resolved.

We present CART (Context-Anchored Recurrent Transformer), a parameter-efficient language model that reuses a single shared core block R times across depth. Unlike prior looped transformers that recompute key-value tensors at every iteration, CART computes K and V once from a multi-layer prelude and has the recurrent core cross-attend to those frozen tensors via multi-head latent attention. A learned Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) gate keeps the recurrence stable: its spectral radius settles in a narrow band (rho in [0.79, 0.83]) across all 36 fully-trained configurations. We evaluate CART on single consumer GPUs in two stages: a 64-configuration screen at 3,000 steps, then 36 configurations (P=6, R in {6,8,10}, three seeds) trained for 30,500 steps (~1B tokens). Two patterns hold across widths d in {256,512,768,1024}: prelude depth P dominates loop count R, and the Stage-1 ranking of R reverses at full training (R=6 becomes best at d>=512). At the binding d=1024 parameter-parity test, CART does not beat a parameter-matched dense baseline, losing by 1-2% at stored-parameter parity and by ~10% at effective-parameter parity. Diagnostic ablations split the effective-parameter gap into ~5% from weight sharing and a residual ~5% from the heterogeneous prelude/anchor/core/coda framing; the recurrent-core machinery (hyper-connections, LTI gate, loop-index embedding) is individually vestigial. Variable-R inference degrades on both sides of the trained R, a negative result for test-time depth scaling under this recipe.

Recent generative image editing methods adopt layered representations to mitigate the entangled nature of raster images and improve controllability, typically relying on object-based segmentation. However, such strategies may fail to capture the structural and stylized properties of human-created images, such as anime illustrations. To solve this issue, we propose a workflow-aware structured layer decomposition framework tailored to the illustration production of anime artwork. Inspired by the creation pipeline of anime production, our method decomposes the illustration into semantically meaningful production layers, including line art, flat color, shadow, and highlight. To decouple all these layers, we introduce lightweight layer semantic embeddings to provide specific task guidance for each layer. Furthermore, a set of layer-wise losses is incorporated to supervise the training process of individual layers. To overcome the lack of ground-truth layered data, we construct a high-quality illustration dataset that simulated the standard anime production workflow. Experiments demonstrate that the accurate and visually coherent layer decompositions were achieved by using our method. We believe that the resulting layered representation further enables downstream tasks such as recoloring and embedding texture, supporting content creation, and illustration editing. Code is available at: https://github.com/zty0304/Anime-layer-decomposition

Production LLM-agent frameworks expose control primitives -- human-in-the-loop approval gates, run cancellation, and execution timeouts -- whose names and documentation imply barrier semantics: while a run is paused, cancelled, or timed out, no gated side effect executes. We show this implied contract holds on none of the six widely used open-source frameworks we test. Model-free differential probes isolate a recurring sibling leak -- an approval gate suspends its own branch while a sibling branch's effect executes during the pause, so a later rejection cannot prevent it -- in every framework shipping a pre-execution gate (five of six), plus three further gaps: replay double-execution, cancellation orphans, and timeout zombies. The hazard is reachable, not merely constructible: under an a-priori-fixed protocol, frontier models emit the leak-triggering plan shape at pooled rates up to 14%, and when live models drive the unmodified frameworks under an approval pause, 215 of 1,200 runs execute their effect during the pause, across three schedulers and two language runtimes. To repair the measured gaps we present SOUNDGATE, an environment-external effect gate in Rust through which every side effect must be admitted, enforcing hold-until-decided, reject-cancels, dedup-on-replay, and fence-on-cancel -- one property per violation class -- under a stated complete-mediation contract discharged for network egress by kernel-enforced routes. We verify the properties over a model of the admission core (Verus; TLA+/TLC, exhaustive to 7.5e7 states; TLAPS), model-check the deployed Rust with Loom, and bridge model to code by differential conformance over 1.2e7 operations -- refinement evidence, not a mechanized proof. SOUNDGATE blocks every measured violation end-to-end on all six frameworks while releasing legitimate effects, at about 1 ms admission per write and 12k-26k durable admissions per second.

We present a simple meta quantization approach that quantizes different layers of a large language model (LLM) at different bit levels, and is independent of the underlying quantization technique. Specifically, we quantize the most important layers to higher bit precision and less important layers to lower bits. We propose two effective strategies to measure the importance of layers within LLMs: the first measures the importance of a layer based on how different its output embeddings are from the input embeddings (higher is better); the second estimates the importance of a layer using the number of layer weights that are much larger than average (smaller is better). We show that quantizing different layers at varying bits according to our importance scores results in minimal performance drop with a far more compressed model size. Finally, we present several practical key takeaways from our variable layer-wise quantization experiments: (a) LLM performance under variable quantization remains close to the original model until 25-50% of layers are moved in lower quantization using our proposed ordering but only until 5-10% if moved using no specific ordering; (b) Adding layer importance to inherently dynamic quantization techniques can further improve their performance, showing that our approach is complementary to other dynamic quantization methods; (c) Quantizing LLMs to lower bits performs substantially better than pruning unless extreme quantization (2-bit) is used; and (d) Layer-wise quantization to lower bits works better in the case of larger LLMs with more layers compared to smaller LLMs with fewer layers. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RazvanDu/LayerwiseQuant/.