GLAI: GreenLightningAI for Accelerated Training through Knowledge Decoupling

Abstract

In this work we introduce GreenLightningAI (GLAI), a new architectural block designed as an alternative to conventional MLPs. The central idea is to separate two types of knowledge that are usually entangled during training: (i) *structural knowledge*, encoded by the stable activation patterns induced by ReLU activations; and (ii) *quantitative knowledge*, carried by the numerical weights and biases. By fixing the structure once stabilized, GLAI reformulates the MLP as a combination of paths, where only the quantitative component is optimized. This reformulation retains the universal approximation capabilities of MLPs, yet achieves a more efficient training process, reducing training time by ~40% on average across the cases examined in this study. Crucially, GLAI is not just another classifier, but a generic block that can replace MLPs wherever they are used, from supervised heads with frozen backbones to projection layers in self-supervised learning or few-shot classifiers. Across diverse experimental setups, GLAI consistently matches or exceeds the accuracy of MLPs with an equivalent number of parameters, while converging faster. Overall, GLAI establishes a new design principle that opens a direction for future integration into large-scale architectures such as Transformers, where MLP blocks dominate the computational footprint.