arXiv subjects

Ivan Kobyzev

Publications and source records attributed to Ivan Kobyzev.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Survival-Guided Length Control for Efficient Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked sequences, but standard decoding either fixes the sequence length or relies on ad hoc stopping rules, often leading to unnecessary denoising steps. We recast length selection as a discrete-time survival problem over the end-of-sequence token and propose a plug-in, training-free length predictor that can be added to any existing DLM. Across reasoning and code-generation benchmarks, survival-guided length decoding speeds up inference by up to 7 times while preserving task accuracy. We further find that predicted lengths vary widely even within the same dataset, making model performance sensitive to the chosen length.

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arXiv2026

BOSCH: Black-Box Binary Optimization for Short-Context Attention-Head Selection in LLMs

Post-training hybridization of large language models (LLMs) often replaces quadratic self-attention with sliding-window attention (SWA) to reduce KV cache usage and improve latency. Existing hybridization schemes are typically defined either at the layer level (e.g., interleaving) or at the head level via static rankings from local to global. Layer-level schemes ignore that local and global dependencies are routed through heads within the same layer, while static head-level rankings suffer from entanglement: a head's local/global behavior can change after hybridization. We propose BOSCH, Black-box Binary Optimization for Short-context Head Selection, a training-free method that formulates the problem as a Large Neighborhood Search and decomposes it into three subproblems: (i) layer-importance detection via small-budget black-box probes, (ii) adaptive per-layer SWA-ratio assignment based on these sensitivities, and (iii) grouped head-level optimization within ratio buckets. Extensive experiments on 4 LLMs ranging from 1.7B to 30B parameters, across 4 SWA ratios, show that BOSCH consistently outperforms layer-level heuristics and 6 strong static head-level methods, with larger gains at higher SWA ratios. Under continual pretraining, BOSCH recover original long-context performance faster and to a higher level. Analysis of the selected heads reveals substantial turnover for BOSCH across different SWA ratios, underscoring the importance of performing head-level selection for each target ratio rather than relying on fixed locality rankings.

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arXiv2025

Integral Transformer: Denoising Attention, Not Too Much Not Too Little

Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential Transformer have addressed this by introducing negative attention scores, they risk discarding useful information. In this paper, we propose the Integral Transformer, a novel self-attention mechanism that denoises attention by integrating signals sampled from the logit distribution. Our approach mitigates noise while preserving the contributions of special tokens critical for model performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms vanilla, Cog, and Differential attention variants on well-established knowledge and reasoning language benchmarks. Moreover, our analysis reveals that employing vanilla self-attention in the lower Transformer layers enhances performance and that the Integral Transformer effectively balances attention distributions and reduces rank collapse in upper layers.

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arXiv2025

ReGLA: Refining Gated Linear Attention

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have set themselves apart with their exceptional performance in complex language modelling tasks. However, these models are also known for their significant computational and storage requirements, primarily due to the quadratic computation complexity of softmax attention. To mitigate this issue, linear attention has been designed to reduce the quadratic space-time complexity that is inherent in standard transformers. In this work, we embarked on a comprehensive exploration of three key components that substantially impact the performance of the Gated Linear Attention module: feature maps, normalization, and the gating mechanism. We developed a feature mapping function to address some crucial issues that previous suggestions overlooked. Then we offered further rationale for the integration of normalization layers to stabilize the training process. Moreover, we explored the saturation phenomenon of the gating mechanism and augmented it with a refining module. We conducted extensive experiments and showed our architecture outperforms previous Gated Linear Attention mechanisms in extensive tasks including training from scratch and post-linearization with continual pre-training.

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arXiv2024

Draft on the Fly: Adaptive Self-Speculative Decoding using Cosine Similarity

We present a simple on the fly method for faster inference of large language models. Unlike other (self-)speculative decoding techniques, our method does not require fine-tuning or black-box optimization to generate a fixed draft model, relying instead on simple rules to generate varying draft models adapted to the input context. We show empirically that our light-weight algorithm is competitive with the current SOTA for self-speculative decoding, while being a truly plug-and-play method.

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arXiv2024

OTTAWA: Optimal TransporT Adaptive Word Aligner for Hallucination and Omission Translation Errors Detection

Recently, there has been considerable attention on detecting hallucinations and omissions in Machine Translation (MT) systems. The two dominant approaches to tackle this task involve analyzing the MT system's internal states or relying on the output of external tools, such as sentence similarity or MT quality estimators. In this work, we introduce OTTAWA, a novel Optimal Transport (OT)-based word aligner specifically designed to enhance the detection of hallucinations and omissions in MT systems. Our approach explicitly models the missing alignments by introducing a "null" vector, for which we propose a novel one-side constrained OT setting to allow an adaptive null alignment. Our approach yields competitive results compared to state-of-the-art methods across 18 language pairs on the HalOmi benchmark. In addition, it shows promising features, such as the ability to distinguish between both error types and perform word-level detection without accessing the MT system's internal states.

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arXiv2024

Resonance RoPE: Improving Context Length Generalization of Large Language Models

This paper addresses the challenge of train-short-test-long (TSTL) scenarios in Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), where models pre-trained on shorter sequences face difficulty with out-of-distribution (OOD) token positions in longer sequences. We introduce Resonance RoPE, a novel approach designed to narrow the generalization gap in TSTL scenarios by refining the interpolation of RoPE features for OOD positions, significantly improving the model performance without additional online computational costs. Furthermore, we present PosGen, a new synthetic benchmark specifically designed for fine-grained behavior analysis in TSTL scenarios, aiming to isolate the constantly increasing difficulty of token generation on long contexts from the challenges of recognizing new token positions. Our experiments on synthetic tasks show that after applying Resonance RoPE, Transformers recognize OOD position better and more robustly. Our extensive LLM experiments also show superior performance after applying Resonance RoPE to the current state-of-the-art RoPE scaling method, YaRN, on both upstream language modeling tasks and a variety of downstream long-text applications.

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arXiv2023

Hyperparameter Optimization for Large Language Model Instruction-Tuning

The fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) has enabled them to recently achieve milestones in natural language processing applications. The emergence of ever larger LLMs has paved the way for more efficient fine-tuning methods. Among these, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method keeps most of the weights of the pre-trained LLM frozen while introducing a low-rank decomposition of the weight matrix, enabling the tuning of only a very small proportion of the network. The performance on downstream tasks of models fine-tuned with LoRA heavily relies on a set of hyperparameters including the rank of the decomposition. In this work, we investigate the choice of these hyperparameters through two main blackbox optimization (BBO) techniques. We examine the whole pipeline of performing fine-tuning and validation on a pre-trained LLM as a blackbox and efficiently explore the space of hyperparameters with the \nomad algorithm, achieving a boost in performance and human alignment of the tuned model.

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arXiv2023

Attribute Controlled Dialogue Prompting

Prompt-tuning has become an increasingly popular parameter-efficient method for adapting large pretrained language models to downstream tasks. However, both discrete prompting and continuous prompting assume fixed prompts for all data samples within a task, neglecting the fact that inputs vary greatly in some tasks such as open-domain dialogue generation. In this paper, we present a novel, instance-specific prompt-tuning algorithm for dialogue generation. Specifically, we generate prompts based on instance-level control code, rather than the conversation history, to explore their impact on controlled dialogue generation. Experiments on popular open-domain dialogue datasets, evaluated on both automated metrics and human evaluation, demonstrate that our method is superior to prompting baselines and comparable to fine-tuning with only 5%-6% of total parameters.

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arXiv2023

LABO: Towards Learning Optimal Label Regularization via Bi-level Optimization

Regularization techniques are crucial to improving the generalization performance and training efficiency of deep neural networks. Many deep learning algorithms rely on weight decay, dropout, batch/layer normalization to converge faster and generalize. Label Smoothing (LS) is another simple, versatile and efficient regularization which can be applied to various supervised classification tasks. Conventional LS, however, regardless of the training instance assumes that each non-target class is equally likely. In this work, we present a general framework for training with label regularization, which includes conventional LS but can also model instance-specific variants. Based on this formulation, we propose an efficient way of learning LAbel regularization by devising a Bi-level Optimization (LABO) problem. We derive a deterministic and interpretable solution of the inner loop as the optimal label smoothing without the need to store the parameters or the output of a trained model. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate our LABO consistently yields improvement over conventional label regularization on various fields, including seven machine translation and three image classification tasks across various

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arXiv2023

Mathematical Challenges in Deep Learning

Deep models are dominating the artificial intelligence (AI) industry since the ImageNet challenge in 2012. The size of deep models is increasing ever since, which brings new challenges to this field with applications in cell phones, personal computers, autonomous cars, and wireless base stations. Here we list a set of problems, ranging from training, inference, generalization bound, and optimization with some formalism to communicate these challenges with mathematicians, statisticians, and theoretical computer scientists. This is a subjective view of the research questions in deep learning that benefits the tech industry in long run.

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arXiv2022

KronA: Parameter Efficient Tuning with Kronecker Adapter

Fine-tuning a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) on a specific downstream task has been a well-known paradigm in Natural Language Processing. However, with the ever-growing size of PLMs, training the entire model on several downstream tasks becomes very expensive and resource-hungry. Recently, different Parameter Efficient Tuning (PET) techniques are proposed to improve the efficiency of fine-tuning PLMs. One popular category of PET methods is the low-rank adaptation methods which insert learnable truncated SVD modules into the original model either sequentially or in parallel. However, low-rank decomposition suffers from limited representation power. In this work, we address this problem using the Kronecker product instead of the low-rank representation. We introduce KronA, a Kronecker product-based adapter module for efficient fine-tuning of Transformer-based PLMs. We apply the proposed methods for fine-tuning T5 on the GLUE benchmark to show that incorporating the Kronecker-based modules can outperform state-of-the-art PET methods.

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arXiv2022

Improving Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models via Stochastic Weight Averaging

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a commonly used technique for improving the generalization of compact Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on downstream tasks. However, such methods impose the additional burden of training a separate teacher model for every new dataset. Alternatively, one may directly work on the improvement of the optimization procedure of the compact model toward better generalization. Recent works observe that the flatness of the local minimum correlates well with better generalization. In this work, we adapt Stochastic Weight Averaging (SWA), a method encouraging convergence to a flatter minimum, to fine-tuning PLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on various NLP tasks (text classification, question answering, and generation) and different model architectures and demonstrate that our adaptation improves the generalization without extra computation cost. Moreover, we observe that this simple optimization technique is able to outperform the state-of-the-art KD methods for compact models.

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arXiv2022

Continuation KD: Improved Knowledge Distillation through the Lens of Continuation Optimization

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has been extensively used for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks to improve a small model's (a student) generalization by transferring the knowledge from a larger model (a teacher). Although KD methods achieve state-of-the-art performance in numerous settings, they suffer from several problems limiting their performance. It is shown in the literature that the capacity gap between the teacher and the student networks can make KD ineffective. Additionally, existing KD techniques do not mitigate the noise in the teacher's output: modeling the noisy behaviour of the teacher can distract the student from learning more useful features. We propose a new KD method that addresses these problems and facilitates the training compared to previous techniques. Inspired by continuation optimization, we design a training procedure that optimizes the highly non-convex KD objective by starting with the smoothed version of this objective and making it more complex as the training proceeds. Our method (Continuation-KD) achieves state-of-the-art performance across various compact architectures on NLU (GLUE benchmark) and computer vision tasks (CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100).

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arXiv2022

DyLoRA: Parameter Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Models using Dynamic Search-Free Low-Rank Adaptation

With the ever-growing size of pretrained models (PMs), fine-tuning them has become more expensive and resource-hungry. As a remedy, low-rank adapters (LoRA) keep the main pretrained weights of the model frozen and just introduce some learnable truncated SVD modules (so-called LoRA blocks) to the model. While LoRA blocks are parameter-efficient, they suffer from two major problems: first, the size of these blocks is fixed and cannot be modified after training (for example, if we need to change the rank of LoRA blocks, then we need to re-train them from scratch); second, optimizing their rank requires an exhaustive search and effort. In this work, we introduce a dynamic low-rank adaptation (DyLoRA) technique to address these two problems together. Our DyLoRA method trains LoRA blocks for a range of ranks instead of a single rank by sorting the representation learned by the adapter module at different ranks during training. We evaluate our solution on different natural language understanding (GLUE benchmark) and language generation tasks (E2E, DART and WebNLG) using different pretrained models such as RoBERTa and GPT with different sizes. Our results show that we can train dynamic search-free models with DyLoRA at least 4 to 7 times (depending to the task) faster than LoRA without significantly compromising performance. Moreover, our models can perform consistently well on a much larger range of ranks compared to LoRA.

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arXiv2022

Learning Functions on Multiple Sets using Multi-Set Transformers

We propose a general deep architecture for learning functions on multiple permutation-invariant sets. We also show how to generalize this architecture to sets of elements of any dimension by dimension equivariance. We demonstrate that our architecture is a universal approximator of these functions, and show superior results to existing methods on a variety of tasks including counting tasks, alignment tasks, distinguishability tasks and statistical distance measurements. This last task is quite important in Machine Learning. Although our approach is quite general, we demonstrate that it can generate approximate estimates of KL divergence and mutual information that are more accurate than previous techniques that are specifically designed to approximate those statistical distances.

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arXiv2022

Do we need Label Regularization to Fine-tune Pre-trained Language Models?

Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a prominent neural model compression technique that heavily relies on teacher network predictions to guide the training of a student model. Considering the ever-growing size of pre-trained language models (PLMs), KD is often adopted in many NLP tasks involving PLMs. However, it is evident that in KD, deploying the teacher network during training adds to the memory and computational requirements of training. In the computer vision literature, the necessity of the teacher network is put under scrutiny by showing that KD is a label regularization technique that can be replaced with lighter teacher-free variants such as the label-smoothing technique. However, to the best of our knowledge, this issue is not investigated in NLP. Therefore, this work concerns studying different label regularization techniques and whether we actually need them to improve the fine-tuning of smaller PLM networks on downstream tasks. In this regard, we did a comprehensive set of experiments on different PLMs such as BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT with more than 600 distinct trials and ran each configuration five times. This investigation led to a surprising observation that KD and other label regularization techniques do not play any meaningful role over regular fine-tuning when the student model is pre-trained. We further explore this phenomenon in different settings of NLP and computer vision tasks and demonstrate that pre-training itself acts as a kind of regularization, and additional label regularization is unnecessary.

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arXiv2021

A Short Study on Compressing Decoder-Based Language Models

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have been successful for a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The state-of-the-art of PLMs, however, are extremely large to be used on edge devices. As a result, the topic of model compression has attracted increasing attention in the NLP community. Most of the existing works focus on compressing encoder-based models (tiny-BERT, distilBERT, distilRoBERTa, etc), however, to the best of our knowledge, the compression of decoder-based models (such as GPT-2) has not been investigated much. Our paper aims to fill this gap. Specifically, we explore two directions: 1) we employ current state-of-the-art knowledge distillation techniques to improve fine-tuning of DistilGPT-2. 2) we pre-train a compressed GPT-2 model using layer truncation and compare it against the distillation-based method (DistilGPT2). The training time of our compressed model is significantly less than DistilGPT-2, but it can achieve better performance when fine-tuned on downstream tasks. We also demonstrate the impact of data cleaning on model performance.

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