arXiv subjects

Scott Roy

Publications and source records attributed to Scott Roy.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ExecuTorch -- A Unified PyTorch Solution to Run AI Models On-Device

Local execution of AI on edge devices is important for low latency and offline operation. However, deploying models on diverse hardware remains fragmented, often requiring model conversion or complete reimplementation outside the PyTorch ecosystem where the model was originally authored. We introduce ExecuTorch, a unified PyTorch-native deployment framework for edge AI. ExecuTorch enables seamless deployment of machine learning models across heterogeneous compute environments. It scales from embedded microcontrollers to complex system-on-chips (SoCs) with dedicated accelerators, powering devices ranging from wearables and smartphones to large compute clusters. ExecuTorch preserves PyTorch semantics while allowing customization, support for optimizations like quantization, and pluggable execution "backends". These features together enable fast experimentation, allowing researchers to validate deployment behavior entirely within PyTorch, bridging the gap between research and production.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

ParetoQ: Improving Scaling Laws in Extremely Low-bit LLM Quantization

The optimal bit-width for achieving the best trade-off between quantized model size and accuracy has been a subject of ongoing debate. While some advocate for 4-bit quantization, others propose that 1.58-bit offers superior results. However, the lack of a cohesive framework for different bits has left such conclusions relatively tenuous. We present ParetoQ, the first unified framework that facilitates rigorous comparisons across 1-bit, 1.58-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, and 4-bit quantization settings. Our findings reveal a notable learning transition between 2 and 3 bits: For 3-bits and above, the fine-tuned models stay close to their original pre-trained distributions, whereas for learning 2-bit networks or below, the representations change drastically. By optimizing training schemes and refining quantization functions, ParetoQ surpasses all previous methods tailored to specific bit widths. Remarkably, our ParetoQ ternary 600M-parameter model even outperforms the previous SoTA ternary 3B-parameter model in accuracy, using only one-fifth of the parameters. Extensive experimentation shows that ternary, 2-bit, and 3-bit quantization maintains comparable performance in the size-accuracy trade-off and generally exceeds 4-bit and binary quantization. Considering hardware constraints, 2-bit quantization offers promising potential for memory reduction and speedup.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Using Machine Translation to Localize Task Oriented NLG Output

One of the challenges in a task oriented natural language application like the Google Assistant, Siri, or Alexa is to localize the output to many languages. This paper explores doing this by applying machine translation to the English output. Using machine translation is very scalable, as it can work with any English output and can handle dynamic text, but otherwise the problem is a poor fit. The required quality bar is close to perfection, the range of sentences is extremely narrow, and the sentences are often very different than the ones in the machine translation training data. This combination of requirements is novel in the field of domain adaptation for machine translation. We are able to reach the required quality bar by building on existing ideas and adding new ones: finetuning on in-domain translations, adding sentences from the Web, adding semantic annotations, and using automatic error detection. The paper shares our approach and results, together with a distillation model to serve the translation models at scale.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Machine Translation Pre-training for Data-to-Text Generation -- A Case Study in Czech

While there is a large body of research studying deep learning methods for text generation from structured data, almost all of it focuses purely on English. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of machine translation based pre-training for data-to-text generation in non-English languages. Since the structured data is generally expressed in English, text generation into other languages involves elements of translation, transliteration and copying - elements already encoded in neural machine translation systems. Moreover, since data-to-text corpora are typically small, this task can benefit greatly from pre-training. Based on our experiments on Czech, a morphologically complex language, we find that pre-training lets us train end-to-end models with significantly improved performance, as judged by automatic metrics and human evaluation. We also show that this approach enjoys several desirable properties, including improved performance in low data scenarios and robustness to unseen slot values.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

APE at Scale and its Implications on MT Evaluation Biases

In this work, we train an Automatic Post-Editing (APE) model and use it to reveal biases in standard Machine Translation (MT) evaluation procedures. The goal of our APE model is to correct typical errors introduced by the translation process, and convert the "translationese" output into natural text. Our APE model is trained entirely on monolingual data that has been round-trip translated through English, to mimic errors that are similar to the ones introduced by NMT. We apply our model to the output of existing NMT systems, and demonstrate that, while the human-judged quality improves in all cases, BLEU scores drop with forward-translated test sets. We verify these results for the WMT18 English to German, WMT15 English to French, and WMT16 English to Romanian tasks. Furthermore, we selectively apply our APE model on the output of the top submissions of the most recent WMT evaluation campaigns. We see quality improvements on all tasks of up to 2.5 BLEU points.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Unsupervised Natural Language Generation with Denoising Autoencoders

Generating text from structured data is important for various tasks such as question answering and dialog systems. We show that in at least one domain, without any supervision and only based on unlabeled text, we are able to build a Natural Language Generation (NLG) system with higher performance than supervised approaches. In our approach, we interpret the structured data as a corrupt representation of the desired output and use a denoising auto-encoder to reconstruct the sentence. We show how to introduce noise into training examples that do not contain structured data, and that the resulting denoising auto-encoder generalizes to generate correct sentences when given structured data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

An optimal first order method based on optimal quadratic averaging

In a recent paper, Bubeck, Lee, and Singh introduced a new first order method for minimizing smooth strongly convex functions. Their geometric descent algorithm, largely inspired by the ellipsoid method, enjoys the optimal linear rate of convergence. We show that the same iterate sequence is generated by a scheme that in each iteration computes an optimal average of quadratic lower-models of the function. Indeed, the minimum of the averaged quadratic approaches the true minimum at an optimal rate. This intuitive viewpoint reveals clear connections to the original fast-gradient methods and cutting plane ideas, and leads to limited-memory extensions with improved performance.

math.OC↗

arXiv2016

Contextual LSTM (CLSTM) models for Large scale NLP tasks

Documents exhibit sequential structure at multiple levels of abstraction (e.g., sentences, paragraphs, sections). These abstractions constitute a natural hierarchy for representing the context in which to infer the meaning of words and larger fragments of text. In this paper, we present CLSTM (Contextual LSTM), an extension of the recurrent neural network LSTM (Long-Short Term Memory) model, where we incorporate contextual features (e.g., topics) into the model. We evaluate CLSTM on three specific NLP tasks: word prediction, next sentence selection, and sentence topic prediction. Results from experiments run on two corpora, English documents in Wikipedia and a subset of articles from a recent snapshot of English Google News, indicate that using both words and topics as features improves performance of the CLSTM models over baseline LSTM models for these tasks. For example on the next sentence selection task, we get relative accuracy improvements of 21% for the Wikipedia dataset and 18% for the Google News dataset. This clearly demonstrates the significant benefit of using context appropriately in natural language (NL) tasks. This has implications for a wide variety of NL applications like question answering, sentence completion, paraphrase generation, and next utterance prediction in dialog systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Level-set methods for convex optimization

Convex optimization problems arising in applications often have favorable objective functions and complicated constraints, thereby precluding first-order methods from being immediately applicable. We describe an approach that exchanges the roles of the objective and constraint functions, and instead approximately solves a sequence of parametric level-set problems. A zero-finding procedure, based on inexact function evaluations and possibly inexact derivative information, leads to an efficient solution scheme for the original problem. We describe the theoretical and practical properties of this approach for a broad range of problems, including low-rank semidefinite optimization, sparse optimization, and generalized linear models for inference.

math.OC↗

arXiv2011

Hierarchical Composable Optimization of Web Pages

The process of creating modern Web media experiences is challenged by the need to adapt the content and presentation choices to dynamic real-time fluctuations of user interest across multiple audiences. We introduce FAME - a Framework for Agile Media Experiences - which addresses this scalability problem. FAME allows media creators to define abstract page models that are subsequently transformed into real experiences through algorithmic experimentation. FAME's page models are hierarchically composed of simple building blocks, mirroring the structure of most Web pages. They are resolved into concrete page instances by pluggable algorithms which optimize the pages for specific business goals. Our framework allows retrieving dynamic content from multiple sources, defining the experimentation's degrees of freedom, and constraining the algorithmic choices. It offers an effective separation of concerns in the media creation process, enabling multiple stakeholders with profoundly different skills to apply their crafts and perform their duties independently, composing and reusing each other's work in modular ways.

cs.IR↗