ZeroHour

Search: “sparse-models”

29 stories in the last 3d

Smart search ranks by meaning as well as keywords (one row per story, last 45 days).

SAS: Simple Attention Sparsification via End-to-End Optimization of Context Ranking

SAS trains attention sparsification end-to-end with the language modeling loss, beating sparse attention baselines especially under tight context budgets.

Simple Attention Sparsification (SAS) injects the selector's continuous scores into attention logits in log form inside the softmax, letting gradients from the language modeling loss directly update the ranking of context units. The method uses normalized softmax gates calibrated against the current block and a memory-efficient Triton kernel integrated into FlashAttention-style computation. Across reasoning, long-context, and agentic tasks, SAS consistently outperforms trainable sparse attention baselines across budgets, with the largest gains under tight attention budgets.

Hugging Face daily papersupdated · 4d agofirst · 5d agoAI research 2 sources1

The Price of Sparsity: Sufficient Conditions for Sparse Recovery using Sparse and Sparsified Measurements

Researchers derive sufficient sample-size conditions for recovering sparse binary signals from sparse Gaussian measurements, quantifying an information-theoretic threshold of order slog(p/s)/log(ds/p).

The paper studies support recovery of sparse binary signals from noisy linear measurements. For sparse Gaussian designs, the authors identify sufficient minimal sample sizes for maximum-likelihood recovery in the high-SNR regime d*s/p -> infinity, yielding an information-theoretic threshold of order slog(p/s)/log(ds/p) that makes the price of measurement sparsity explicit. They also show a regime where the sample-complexity loss from sparsity is only logarithmic while computational gains are nearly linear, and prove that for independently sparsified dense Gaussian designs a sample size of order p/ψ² suffices for support recovery at any fixed error level.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Training and Finetuning Multi-Vector Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face published a tutorial on training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models using the Sentence Transformers library.

Hugging Face's blog walks through training and finetuning multi-vector embedding models with Sentence Transformers. Multi-vector approaches store multiple vectors per document to support late-interaction retrieval. The post is a practical guide for developers building retrieval pipelines with the library.

Hugging Face Blog · 21d agoAI tools & infra1

Data Scarcity and Model Sparsity: Mixtures-of-Experts Overfit More to Repeated Data

Study finds Mixture-of-Experts models overfit faster than dense Transformers under repeated training data, with degradation tied to total parameter sparsity.

Across models from 80M to 1B active parameters (8.5B total), MoE architectures degrade more rapidly than dense models when training data is repeated, with the effect increasing with sparsity as dictated by total parameters. Dense 80M models tolerate 8x repetition with minimal loss while MoEs suffer at 4x and underperform dense models beyond 32x. Masking-based regularization such as dropout mitigates overfitting, letting MoEs beat dense models even at over 64x repetition, though no method matches all-unique training data. Routing stabilizes early and expert specialization correlates with overfitting to repeated data.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

Implementing a White-Box Undetectable Backdoor for Random Fourier Features

Researchers implement Goldwasser's CLWE-based undetectable backdoor for Random Fourier Features models in numpy/scipy, confirming practical realizability with no detectable differences from clean models.

The paper provides an end-to-end implementation of the Goldwasser et al. white-box undetectable backdoor for models trained with the Random Fourier Features algorithm, using only numpy and scipy. It derives two samplers for the core GP_d(b_k) distribution: a rejection-sampling proxy and an exact closed-form sampler verified against its analytic form. Statistical indistinguishability tests covering weight-space and functional black-box comparisons found no detectable difference between backdoored and clean models across sparsity ratios. The underlying lattice hardness reduction was not reproduced, and the work demonstrates the threat is realizable with commodity scientific-computing tools rather than specialized cryptographic infrastructure.

arXiv cs.CR · 1d agoResearch

Graph Machine: Towards Better Pretraining via Edges

Researchers propose Graph Machine, an O(n)-state sparse architecture that replaces 75% of Qwen3-0.6B dense layers with only slight loss change.

The paper introduces the Graph Machine (GM), an architecture that maintains an O(n)-sized state accessed through sparse, dynamic routing via pointer-like edges updated differentiably by a referral mechanism resembling pointer chasing. The authors replaced 75% of dense Transformer layers in Qwen3-0.6B with GM sparse layers and pretrained from scratch on 15.7B tokens. Retrieving 2 of 4,096 tokens per KV head in each sparse layer degrades loss only slightly, while retrieving 4 marginally improves loss over the dense baseline.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

SQS: Bayesian DNN Compression through Sparse Quantized Sub-distributions

SQS unifies weight pruning and low-bit quantization via Bayesian variational learning, compressing Llama3.2 and Qwen2.5 at higher rates with comparable accuracy.

SQS introduces a unified Bayesian variational framework performing simultaneous pruning and low-bit quantization, using a spike-and-slab prior for sparsity and Gaussian Mixture Models to model quantized weights. The authors derive an efficient approximation for the intractable objective and provide a consistency result for the variational approach. Experiments on ResNet, BERT-base, Llama3.2, and Qwen2.5 show higher compression rates than prior baselines with comparable performance drops.

Hugging Face daily papers · 9d agoAI research

Learning Sparse Decision Trees via Transformer Variational Auto-Encoders

TREVIS uses a Tree Transformer VAE latent space to learn decision trees matching near-optimal predictive performance while improving structural sparsity.

TREVIS learns decision trees optimized for complex objectives by exploring the latent space of a Tree Transformer Variational Auto-Encoder (TTVAE). Mapping trees to continuous latent representations replaces the discrete search space with a continuous one, enabling gradient-based optimization through a differentiable surrogate model. Experiments show TREVIS matches the predictive performance of near-optimal algorithms while improving structural sparsity, targeting high-stakes contexts needing transparent decision logic.

Hugging Face daily papers · 15d agoAI research

Causal Foundation Models

A paper introduces causal foundation models (CFMs): pretrained networks that estimate treatment effects on new datasets via in-context learning without fine-tuning.

Causal foundation models (CFMs) apply the foundation-model paradigm to causal inference, replacing bespoke per-problem estimator pipelines with networks pretrained once at scale. CFMs estimate causal quantities such as the average treatment effect on entirely new datasets through in-context learning, without model updates. The work serves as a practical introduction to the emerging area, covering background in causal inference and machine learning and including example code and Jupyter notebooks.

Hugging Face daily papers · 14d agoAI research

Nearly Tight Rademacher Bounds for Sparsely Activated Neural Networks

Theory paper derives nearly tight Rademacher complexity bounds for sparsely activated one-hidden-layer ReLU networks.

Building on Awasthi et al. (COLT 2024), the authors bound statistical complexity for networks where each input activates at most k of s hidden units. A support-preserving cover and normalized chaining argument remove the explicit dimension factor, with matching lower bounds up to logarithms. They also derive agnostic minimax excess-risk bounds of order min{1, sqrt(s/(km))} for a normalized bounded loss and show bias bounds comparable to WR restore worst-case rates even on domains where sparsity holds globally.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research

Multi-Task Learning for Sparsely-Labeled Time Series: A Case Study on Cold-Hardiness Modeling

Multi-task RNN architectures pooling sparse cultivar data improve grape cold-hardiness and budbreak prediction over single-task and scientific baselines.

Researchers apply recurrent neural networks to daily grape cold-hardiness prediction from weather time series, where per-cultivar labels are temporally sparse and limited. They design multiple multi-task learning architectures that treat cultivars as tasks and evaluate them in both MTL and transfer learning settings. Certain architectures consistently outperform single-task learning and state-of-the-art scientific models, and a single MTL model jointly learning cold hardiness and budbreak improves accuracy on both tasks.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

Understanding the Impact of Model Pruning on Long-Tail Forgetting and Explanation Reliability in Medical Imaging

Systematic study finds model pruning causes frequency-dependent long-tail forgetting in medical imaging and that gradient-informed methods best preserve explanations.

Across two long-tailed medical imaging datasets, two CNN architectures, four pruning methods, and sparsity up to 95%, the study measures predictive performance, explanation stability, and faithfulness. Rare classes degrade earlier and more severely than frequent ones, while explanation reliability depends mainly on the pruning strategy, with gradient-informed methods degrading least. Mechanistic analysis ties explanation collapse to loss of class-discriminative gradients rather than vanishing feature activations, recommending class- and explanation-aware evaluation of compression.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 9d agoAI research

Multi-Vector (Late Interaction) Embedding Models with Sentence Transformers

Hugging Face details building and using multi-vector late-interaction embedding models with Sentence Transformers for retrieval workloads.

Hugging Face published a guide on multi-vector, late-interaction embedding models (ColBERT-style) supported through Sentence Transformers. The post covers how practitioners can build and use these models for retrieval and RAG pipelines. It is a developer tooling and technique write-up, not a security advisory.

Hugging Face Blog · 29d agoAI tools & infra1

LLM Forensics: Where Do Backdoors Hide? Localizing and Controlling Trigger Mechanisms with Sparse Autoencoders

Researchers use sparse autoencoders to localize trigger-based backdoor mechanisms in 1B and 8B LLMs, finding detection features differ from causal control features.

In a controlled language-switching backdoor setting where fixed trigger sequences make 1B and 8B language models continue English prompts in French or German, the authors train sparse autoencoders (SAEs) across layers and transformer components. Attention and MLP features detect triggered prompts with near-perfect F1, but ablating them rarely suppresses the language switch, while residual-stream features can suppress triggered generation and some can induce target-language continuations without the trigger. The work decomposes token-trigger mechanisms into distinct SAE feature roles: trigger detection, residual-stream propagation, and language tracking, a decomposition the authors expect to transfer to other trigger-based backdoors.

Fine-tuning a 350M Model for Better Structured Outputs in 100 GRPO Steps

Hugging Face guide fine-tunes a 350M-parameter model with 100 GRPO steps to improve structured output reliability.

A Hugging Face blog post demonstrates fine-tuning a 350M-parameter model using GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization) with TRL over 100 training steps. The stated goal is more reliable structured outputs from small language models. No article body was available, so details beyond the title are limited.

Hugging Face Blog · 13d agoAI tools & infra

Foundation Models for Generalizable Semantic and Goal-Oriented Communication

FMSGOC uses vision-language foundation model priors plus diffusion reconstruction to enable generalizable semantic communication at 0.039 bits per pixel for 6G.

FMSGOC targets generalization failures in semantic and goal-oriented communication for 6G by leveraging broad visual-linguistic foundation model priors. A vision-language model selects sparse, goal-aligned semantic anchors while a fine-tuned diffusion model performs masked completion to reconstruct images at the receiver, decoupling what to send from how to reconstruct. On CIFAR-10 it reaches 0.039 bits per pixel with cosine similarity 0.87-0.90 and 0.83-0.86 on unseen ImageNet inputs, outperforming end-to-end baselines at lower bit rates.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 8d agoAI research

On the Regularization Landscape for the Linear Recommendation Models

Study shows leading linear recommendation models reduce to nuclear-norm or Frobenius-norm regularization, with two new closed-form low-rank solutions proposed.

The paper unifies top-performing linear recommendation algorithms under a single regularization framework, showing they effectively apply either nuclear-norm or Frobenius-norm regularizers. Nuclear-norm solutions have a rigid structure, are low-rank, and have closed form, while Frobenius-norm solutions are more expressive but full-rank or require hard-to-tune procedures such as ADMM. The authors derive two new low-rank, closed-form solutions that combine the advantages of both regularization families.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

Quenched Ensemble Sampling

Quenched Ensemble Sampling generalizes nested sampling's hard energy constraint to repulsive potentials, traversing first-order phase transitions where tempering fails.

Quenched Ensemble Sampling generalizes nested sampling's hard energy constraint into a family of repulsive potentials at the energy boundary, preserving monotone energy descent while making the constrained target amenable to scalable gradient-based kernels. On synthetic phase-transition models it estimates marginal likelihood and draws posterior samples across first-order transitions where popular alternatives such as tempering fail. Applications include marginal likelihood estimation for Bayesian neural network architecture comparison and partition function estimation in a high-dimensional continuous lattice field theory.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 2d agoAI research1

Likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters through normalizing flows

Researchers decompose normalizing flows to derive near-pivotal statistics for likelihood-free inference with nuisance parameters, recovering the t-test and beating Welch limits.

A new paper decomposes neural-network normalizing flows to uncover pivotal statistics in the presence of nuisance parameters using only a sample generator from the distribution of interest. The statistic is near-pivotal in the sense of minimum average KL-divergence of its p-values and can incorporate prior knowledge of group invariances such as translation and scale. Experiments show it recovers the one-sample t-test almost exactly, outperforms the Welch test on worst-case size over a constrained variance-ratio range, and delivers higher power and much faster runtime than profile likelihood-ratio techniques on small-to-moderate samples.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 6d agoAI research

Measuring benchmark optimization in speech recognition

Hugging Face examines how much speech recognition systems overfit benchmarks and how to measure benchmark optimization in ASR.

A Hugging Face post on measuring benchmark optimization in automatic speech recognition, analyzing how model improvements on benchmarks reflect genuine capability gains versus overfitting. It is evaluation methodology research with no direct security impact.

Hugging Face Blog · 26d agoAI research

Rethinking Heterogeneous System Disaggregation for Subquadratic Attention

SQD disaggregates LLM inference by quadratic versus subquadratic attention layers, improving energy efficiency up to 56% on heterogeneous systems versus GPU-only baselines.

SQD (SubQuadratic Disaggregation) splits decode not by operator type but by quadratic versus subquadratic attention, matching their distinct arithmetic intensity and memory footprints. For sparse attention LLMs it separates top-k selection (requiring full KV indexing) from top-k attention plus FFN; for linear and sliding-window models it separates dense attention layers from subquadratic layers plus FFN. On an adjusted 8xB200 heterogeneous proxy, tokens-per-joule improves 53% on GLM 5.2, 31% on Nemotron 3 Ultra, and 56% on Gemma 4 31B. A Rubin plus LPX analytical model shows 1.2x-1.5x tighter achievable latencies and up to 3.6x higher throughput versus attention-FFN disaggregation.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 4d agoAI research

Benign Loss Landscapes Can Coexist with Worst-Case Hardness

Theory paper shows tree tensor networks contain worst-case hard targets yet benign loss landscapes, with difficulty arising from degenerate saddles.

The paper studies tree tensor networks (TTNs), which generalize deep linear networks and Tucker decompositions and embed arbitrary read-once Boolean formulas. It proves that every local minimum that is minimum-norm is global for every realizable target, so bad local minima do not distinguish typical from worst-case problems. Instead, learning difficulty arises from high-order degenerate saddle points caused by rank-deficiency, illustrated via a parity function case study, linking landscape geometry to computational hardness.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 5d agoAI research

IFM/K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B — new model trending #15 on Hugging Face

IFM released K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B, an open-weights 36B-parameter MoE model with 4B active parameters and native 512K context.

IFM released the final checkpoint of K2-Horizon-MoVA-36B-A4B, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model using Mixture-of-Values (MoVA) attention with 36B total and 4B active parameters. The model supports native 524,288-token context and reportedly outscores open-weight dense and MoE models up to 15x its size on agentic and reasoning benchmarks, while competing against closed frontier models. Intermediate checkpoints, training data, the training recipe, and training code are slated for public release.

Hugging Face trending models · 14d agoModel release

OracleZoom: On-Policy Self-Distillation Inspired Reference-Constrained Recursive Image Super Resolution

OracleZoom enables recursive extreme-scale image super-resolution via reference-constrained on-policy distillation, reducing hallucinations at deep zoom scales.

OracleZoom tackles recursive super-resolution, where repeated feeding of predictions back into the same model leaves deeper-scale outputs unsupervised as required source resolution grows geometrically. The framework trains on its own trajectory while carrying the last ground-truth evidence beyond the supervision boundary, combining direct and cross-scale supervision, a no-reference quality objective, a KL-constrained pretrained latent prior, and EMA consistency. Across seven datasets it achieves state-of-the-art SR quality across zoom scales, averaging 0.713 CLIPIQA with larger gains at deeper scales and significantly reduced hallucinations. Code, data, and models are publicly released.

Hugging Face daily papers · 10d agoAI research

Can Foundation Models Moderate Online Content? Evaluating Instruction- vs. Example-Driven Policy Operationalization

ModerationBench shows foundation models can nearly triple Bluesky's moderation F1 (0.60 vs 0.22), with instruction- and example-driven guidance performing comparably.

Researchers built ModerationBench, a new benchmark of 4,000 manually annotated in-the-wild posts from Bluesky, to test whether foundation models can reliably operationalize content moderation policies. They systematically compare instruction-driven guidance (reasoning from policy precepts) with example-driven guidance (generalizing from precedents) for Vision-Language Models. Both paradigms achieve comparable peak effectiveness, and foundation models nearly triple the F1 of Bluesky's deployed moderation system on Random Posts (0.60 vs 0.22).

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 7d agoAI research1

LimiX-2: A Contextual Mechanism Network Towards General Structured-Data Intelligence

LimiX-2 scales Contextual Mechanism Networks pretrained via context-conditional masked modeling, beating tabular foundation models on TabArena, TALENT, and BCCO benchmarks.

LimiX-2 is a new tabular model in the LimiX family, developed through model and data scaling guided by previously established scaling laws under the Contextual Mechanism Networks (CMNs) paradigm. It is pretrained with Context-Conditional Masked Modeling (CCMM) on synthetic datasets generated by structural causal models spanning diverse graph structures, functional mechanisms, and observation processes. It outperforms dataset-specific models and tabular foundation models on TabArena, TALENT, and BCCO, and its feature attention encodes direct causal relationships, enabling accurate causal skeleton recovery.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL · 1d agoAI research1

WarmBloodAban/Minimax-h3_Singularity — new model trending #22 on Hugging Face

Community fine-tune Minimax-h3_Singularity enhances MiniMax-H3 video generation with HDR quality, distant face restoration, and improved motion, trending #22 on Hugging Face.

Minimax-h3_Singularity is a community fusion fine-tune of the MiniMax-H3 multimodal video generation model, built from multiple checkpoints and refined with pruning and weight optimization. It supports Text-to-Video, Image-to-Video, Reference-to-Video, and Video-to-Video workflows in ComfyUI, and claims improvements in HDR clarity, distant face restoration, motion fluidity, and fantasy VFX. The authors recommend pairing it with the minimax_h3_ref2v_turbo_4step_v0.1 LoRA for four-step accelerated inference, and an online demo is available via RunningHub.

Hugging Face trending models · 10d agoModel release7· 1 read

ReMoMask-2: Latent Retrieval-Augmented Masked Motion Generation

ReMoMask-2 rebuilds retrieval in the generator's latent space for text-to-motion generation, achieving lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen.

ReMoMask-2 is a retrieval-augmented text-to-motion framework that constructs its retrieval database directly in the generator's pre-quantization latent space and aligns text queries through a distilled lightweight projector, eliminating the representation gap. The framework combines Hierarchical Bidirectional Momentum contrastive learning, Semantic Spatial-Temporal Attention, and Topology Structured Masking to handle hierarchical motion structure. The retriever achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, and ReMoMask-2 attains the lowest FID on KIT-ML and SnapMoGen, with a single mask-transformer stage outperforming the previous two-stage pipeline while delivering the fastest inference.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research

Mask Forcing: Improving Autoregressive Video Diffusion Distillation via Dual-Noise Masking Rollout

Researchers propose Mask Forcing, a dual-noise masking rollout that mitigates mode collapse in autoregressive video diffusion distillation.

The paper targets over-saturation and over-smoothing in autoregressive video diffusion models distilled via Distribution Matching Distillation, attributed to reverse-KL mode-seeking behavior. Mask Forcing perturbs the student self-rollout with random masks along spatial and temporal axes, injecting cleaner tokens that act as denoising guidance for noisier tokens. Experiments show improved visual quality across multiple distillation methods without using real video data or extra post-training stages.

Hugging Face daily papers · 8d agoAI research