Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capabilities in mathematical reasoning, particularly with text-based mathematical problems. However, current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), especially those specialized in mathematics, tend to focus predominantly on solving geometric problems but ignore the diversity of visual information available in other areas of mathematics. Moreover, the geometric information for these specialized mathematical MLLMs is derived from several public datasets, which are typically limited in diversity and complexity. To address these limitations, we aim to construct a fine-tuning dataset named MathVL, and develop a series of specialized mathematical MLLMs termed MathGLM-Vision by conducting Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on MathVL with various parameter-scale backbones. To extensively evaluate the effectiveness of MathGLM-Vision, we conduct experiments on several public benchmarks and our curated MathVL-test consisting of 2,000 problems. Experimental results demonstrate that MathGLM-Vision achieves significant improvements compared with some existing models, including backbone models and open-source mathematical MLLMs. These findings indicate the importance of diversity dataset in enhancing the mathematical reasoning abilities of MLLMs.

A dominant assumption in Multimodal Language Model (MLLM) research is that its performance is largely inherited from the LLM backbone, given its immense parameter scale and remarkable capabilities. This has created a void in the understanding of the vision encoder, which determines how MLLMs perceive images. The recent shift in MLLM training paradigms, from Supervised Finetuning (SFT) to Reinforcement Learning (RL), magnifies this oversight-namely, the significant lack of analysis on how such training reshapes the vision encoder as well as the MLLM. To address this, we first investigate the impact of training strategies on MLLMs, where RL shows a clear advantage over SFT in strongly vision-related VQA benchmarks. Motivated by this, we conduct a critical yet under-explored analysis of the vision encoder of MLLMs through diverse and in-depth experiments, ranging from ImageNet classification and segmentation to gradient visualization. Our results demonstrate that MLLM's post-training strategy (i.e., SFT or RL) not only leads to distinct outcomes on MLLM downstream tasks, but also fundamentally reshapes MLLM's underlying visual representations. Specifically, the key finding of our study is that RL produces stronger and precisely localized visual representations compared to SFT, boosting the ability of the vision encoder for MLLM. We then reframe our findings into a simple recipe for building strong vision encoders for MLLMs, Preference-Instructed Vision OpTimization (PIVOT). When integrated into MLLMs, a PIVOT-trained vision encoder outperforms even larger and more heavily-trained counterparts, despite requiring less than 1% of the computational cost of standard vision pretraining. This result opens an effective and efficient path for advancing the vision backbones of MLLMs. Project page available at https://june-page.github.io/pivot/

The large-scale visual pretraining has significantly improve the performance of large vision models. However, we observe the low FLOPs pitfall that the existing low-FLOPs models cannot benefit from large-scale pretraining. In this paper, we propose a general design principle of adding more parameters while maintaining low FLOPs for large-scale visual pretraining, named as ParameterNet. Dynamic convolutions are used for instance to equip the networks with more parameters and only slightly increase the FLOPs. The proposed ParameterNet scheme enables low-FLOPs networks to benefit from large-scale visual pretraining. Experiments on the large-scale ImageNet-22K have shown the superiority of our ParameterNet scheme. For example, ParameterNet-600M can achieve higher accuracy than the widely-used Swin Transformer (81.6\% vs. 80.9\%) and has much lower FLOPs (0.6G vs. 4.5G). The code will be released as soon (MindSpore: https://gitee.com/mindspore/models, PyTorch: https://github.com/huawei-noah/Efficient-AI-Backbones).

Panoramic depth estimation provides a comprehensive solution for capturing complete 360^circ environmental structural information, offering significant benefits for robotics and AR/VR applications. However, while extensively studied in indoor settings, its zero-shot generalization to open-world domains lags far behind perspective images, which benefit from abundant training data. This disparity makes transferring capabilities from the perspective domain an attractive solution. To bridge this gap, we present Depth Anything in 360^circ (DA360), a panoramic-adapted version of Depth Anything V2. Our key innovation involves learning a shift parameter from the ViT backbone, transforming the model's scale- and shift-invariant output into a scale-invariant estimate that directly yields well-formed 3D point clouds. This is complemented by integrating circular padding into the DPT decoder to eliminate seam artifacts, ensuring spatially coherent depth maps that respect spherical continuity. Evaluated on standard indoor benchmarks and our newly curated outdoor dataset, Metropolis, DA360 shows substantial gains over its base model, achieving over 50\% and 10\% relative depth error reduction on indoor and outdoor benchmarks, respectively. Furthermore, DA360 significantly outperforms robust panoramic depth estimation methods, achieving about 30\% relative error improvement compared to PanDA across all three test datasets and establishing new state-of-the-art performance for zero-shot panoramic depth estimation.

Efficiently capturing multi-scale information and building long-range dependencies among pixels are essential for medical image segmentation because of the various sizes and shapes of the lesion regions or organs. In this paper, we present Multi-scale Cross-axis Attention (MCA) to solve the above challenging issues based on the efficient axial attention. Instead of simply connecting axial attention along the horizontal and vertical directions sequentially, we propose to calculate dual cross attentions between two parallel axial attentions to capture global information better. To process the significant variations of lesion regions or organs in individual sizes and shapes, we also use multiple convolutions of strip-shape kernels with different kernel sizes in each axial attention path to improve the efficiency of the proposed MCA in encoding spatial information. We build the proposed MCA upon the MSCAN backbone, yielding our network, termed MCANet. Our MCANet with only 4M+ parameters performs even better than most previous works with heavy backbones (e.g., Swin Transformer) on four challenging tasks, including skin lesion segmentation, nuclei segmentation, abdominal multi-organ segmentation, and polyp segmentation. Code is available at https://github.com/haoshao-nku/medical_seg.

Text-to-image generation with visual autoregressive~(VAR) models has recently achieved impressive advances in generation fidelity and inference efficiency. While control mechanisms have been explored for diffusion models, enabling precise and flexible control within VAR paradigm remains underexplored. To bridge this critical gap, in this paper, we introduce ScaleWeaver, a novel framework designed to achieve high-fidelity, controllable generation upon advanced VAR models through parameter-efficient fine-tuning. The core module in ScaleWeaver is the improved MMDiT block with the proposed Reference Attention module, which efficiently and effectively incorporates conditional information. Different from MM Attention, the proposed Reference Attention module discards the unnecessary attention from imagerightarrowcondition, reducing computational cost while stabilizing control injection. Besides, it strategically emphasizes parameter reuse, leveraging the capability of the VAR backbone itself with a few introduced parameters to process control information, and equipping a zero-initialized linear projection to ensure that control signals are incorporated effectively without disrupting the generative capability of the base model. Extensive experiments show that ScaleWeaver delivers high-quality generation and precise control while attaining superior efficiency over diffusion-based methods, making ScaleWeaver a practical and effective solution for controllable text-to-image generation within the visual autoregressive paradigm. Code and models will be released.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically bridge the gap between perceptual and action spaces by pre-training a large-scale Vision-Language Model (VLM) on robotic data. While this approach greatly enhances performance, it also incurs significant training costs. In this paper, we investigate how to effectively bridge vision-language (VL) representations to action (A). We introduce VLA-Adapter, a novel paradigm designed to reduce the reliance of VLA models on large-scale VLMs and extensive pre-training. To this end, we first systematically analyze the effectiveness of various VL conditions and present key findings on which conditions are essential for bridging perception and action spaces. Based on these insights, we propose a lightweight Policy module with Bridge Attention, which autonomously injects the optimal condition into the action space. In this way, our method achieves high performance using only a 0.5B-parameter backbone, without any robotic data pre-training. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world robotic benchmarks demonstrate that VLA-Adapter not only achieves state-of-the-art level performance, but also offers the fast inference speed reported to date. Furthermore, thanks to the proposed advanced bridging paradigm, VLA-Adapter enables the training of a powerful VLA model in just 8 hours on a single consumer-grade GPU, greatly lowering the barrier to deploying the VLA model. Project page: https://vla-adapter.github.io/.

Traditional audio-visual methods rely on independent audio and visual backbones, which is costly and not scalable. In this work, we investigate using an audio-visual siamese network (AVSiam) for efficient and scalable audio-visual pretraining. Our framework uses a single shared vision transformer backbone to process audio and visual inputs, improving its parameter efficiency, reducing the GPU memory footprint, and allowing us to scale our method to larger datasets and model sizes. We pretrain our model using a contrastive audio-visual matching objective with a multi-ratio random masking scheme, which enables our model to process larger audio-visual instance batches, helpful for contrastive learning. Unlike prior audio-visual methods, our method can robustly handle audio, visual, and audio-visual inputs with a single shared ViT backbone. Furthermore, despite using the shared backbone for both modalities, AVSiam achieves competitive or even better results than prior methods on AudioSet and VGGSound for audio-visual classification and retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/GenjiB/AVSiam

Recent studies show that the visual place recognition (VPR) method using pre-trained visual foundation models can achieve promising performance. In our previous work, we propose a novel method to realize seamless adaptation of foundation models to VPR (SelaVPR). This method can produce both global and local features that focus on discriminative landmarks to recognize places for two-stage VPR by a parameter-efficient adaptation approach. Although SelaVPR has achieved competitive results, we argue that the previous adaptation is inefficient in training time and GPU memory usage, and the re-ranking paradigm is also costly in retrieval latency and storage usage. In pursuit of higher efficiency and better performance, we propose an extension of the SelaVPR, called SelaVPR++. Concretely, we first design a parameter-, time-, and memory-efficient adaptation method that uses lightweight multi-scale convolution (MultiConv) adapters to refine intermediate features from the frozen foundation backbone. This adaptation method does not back-propagate gradients through the backbone during training, and the MultiConv adapter facilitates feature interactions along the spatial axes and introduces proper local priors, thus achieving higher efficiency and better performance. Moreover, we propose an innovative re-ranking paradigm for more efficient VPR. Instead of relying on local features for re-ranking, which incurs huge overhead in latency and storage, we employ compact binary features for initial retrieval and robust floating-point (global) features for re-ranking. To obtain such binary features, we propose a similarity-constrained deep hashing method, which can be easily integrated into the VPR pipeline. Finally, we improve our training strategy and unify the training protocol of several common training datasets to merge them for better training of VPR models. Extensive experiments show that ......

The cost of hyperparameter tuning in deep learning has been rising with model sizes, prompting practitioners to find new tuning methods using a proxy of smaller networks. One such proposal uses muP parameterized networks, where the optimal hyperparameters for small width networks transfer to networks with arbitrarily large width. However, in this scheme, hyperparameters do not transfer across depths. As a remedy, we study residual networks with a residual branch scale of 1/text{depth} in combination with the muP parameterization. We provide experiments demonstrating that residual architectures including convolutional ResNets and Vision Transformers trained with this parameterization exhibit transfer of optimal hyperparameters across width and depth on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Furthermore, our empirical findings are supported and motivated by theory. Using recent developments in the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) description of neural network learning dynamics, we show that this parameterization of ResNets admits a well-defined feature learning joint infinite-width and infinite-depth limit and show convergence of finite-size network dynamics towards this limit.

The performance of a language model has been shown to be effectively modeled as a power-law in its parameter count. Here we study the scaling behaviors of Routing Networks: architectures that conditionally use only a subset of their parameters while processing an input. For these models, parameter count and computational requirement form two independent axes along which an increase leads to better performance. In this work we derive and justify scaling laws defined on these two variables which generalize those known for standard language models and describe the performance of a wide range of routing architectures trained via three different techniques. Afterwards we provide two applications of these laws: first deriving an Effective Parameter Count along which all models scale at the same rate, and then using the scaling coefficients to give a quantitative comparison of the three routing techniques considered. Our analysis derives from an extensive evaluation of Routing Networks across five orders of magnitude of size, including models with hundreds of experts and hundreds of billions of parameters.

Privacy-preserving adaptation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in sensitive domains (e.g., mental health) requires balancing strict confidentiality with model utility and safety. We propose FedMentor, a federated fine-tuning framework that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and domain-aware Differential Privacy (DP) to meet per-domain privacy budgets while maintaining performance. Each client (domain) applies a custom DP noise scale proportional to its data sensitivity, and the server adaptively reduces noise when utility falls below a threshold. In experiments on three mental health datasets, we show that FedMentor improves safety over standard Federated Learning without privacy, raising safe output rates by up to three points and lowering toxicity, while maintaining utility (BERTScore F1 and ROUGE-L) within 0.5% of the non-private baseline and close to the centralized upper bound. The framework scales to backbones with up to 1.7B parameters on single-GPU clients, requiring < 173 MB of communication per round. FedMentor demonstrates a practical approach to privately fine-tune LLMs for safer deployments in healthcare and other sensitive fields.

Robust and effective scaling of models from small to large width typically requires the precise adjustment of many algorithmic and architectural details, such as parameterization and optimizer choices. In this work, we propose a new perspective on parameterization by investigating a key assumption in prior work about the alignment between parameters and data and derive new theoretical results under weaker assumptions and a broader set of optimizers. Our extensive empirical investigation includes tens of thousands of models trained with all combinations of three optimizers, four parameterizations, several alignment assumptions, more than a dozen learning rates, and fourteen model sizes up to 26.8B parameters. We find that the best learning rate scaling prescription would often have been excluded by the assumptions in prior work. Our results show that all parameterizations, not just maximal update parameterization (muP), can achieve hyperparameter transfer; moreover, our novel per-layer learning rate prescription for standard parameterization outperforms muP. Finally, we demonstrate that an overlooked aspect of parameterization, the epsilon parameter in Adam, must be scaled correctly to avoid gradient underflow and propose Adam-atan2, a new numerically stable, scale-invariant version of Adam that eliminates the epsilon hyperparameter entirely.

Scaling laws are typically fit using a family of models with a narrow range of frozen hyper-parameter choices. In this work we study scaling laws using a wide range of architecture and hyper-parameter choices, and highlight their impact on resulting prescriptions. As a primary artifact of our research, we release the Gemstones: the most comprehensive open-source scaling law dataset to date, consisting of over 4000 checkpoints from transformers with up to 2 billion parameters; these models have been trained with different learning rates, cooldown schedules, and architectural shapes. Our checkpoints enable more complex studies of scaling, such as a law that predicts language modeling performance as a function of model width and depth. By examining the various facets of our model suite, we find that the prescriptions of scaling laws can be highly sensitive to the experimental design process and the specific model checkpoints used during fitting. Code: https://github.com/mcleish7/gemstone-scaling-laws

The scale of large pre-trained models (PTMs) poses significant challenges in adapting to downstream tasks due to the high optimization overhead and storage costs associated with full-parameter fine-tuning. To address this, many studies explore parameter-efficient tuning methods, also framed as "delta tuning", which updates only a small subset of parameters, known as "delta modules", while keeping the backbone model's parameters fixed. However, the practicality and flexibility of delta tuning have been limited due to existing implementations that directly modify the code of the backbone PTMs and hard-code specific delta tuning methods for each PTM. In this paper, we present OpenDelta, an open-source library that overcomes these limitations by providing a plug-and-play implementation of various delta tuning methods. Our novel techniques eliminate the need to modify the backbone PTMs' code, making OpenDelta compatible with different, even novel PTMs. OpenDelta is designed to be simple, modular, and extensible, providing a comprehensive platform for researchers and practitioners to adapt large PTMs efficiently.

Empirical scaling laws prescribe how to allocate parameters, data, and compute, while maximal-update parameterization (muP) enables learning-rate transfer across widths by equalizing early-time update magnitudes. However, in modern scale-invariant architectures, training quickly enters an optimizer-governed steady state where normalization layers create backward scale sensitivity and the effective learning rate becomes width dependent, degrading muP transfer. We address this by introducing a weight-decay scaling rule for AdamW that preserves sublayer gain across widths. Empirically, the singular-value spectrum of each matrix parameter scales in norm as eta/lambda with an approximately invariant shape; under width scaling d, we observe that the top singular value scales approximately as eta/lambdacdot d^{0.75}. Combining this observation with the muP learning-rate rule eta_2propto d^{-1} for matrix-like parameters implies an empirical weight-decay scaling rule lambda_2propto d that approximately keeps sublayer gains width invariant. Together with vector-like parameters trained at eta_1=Theta_d(1) and lambda_1=0, this yields zero-shot transfer of both learning rate and weight decay from proxy to target widths, removing per-width sweeps. We validate the rule on LLaMA-style Transformers and in a minimal synthetic setting, and we provide a simple diagnostic, matching top singular values, to check sublayer-gain invariance. Our results extend muP beyond the near-init regime by explicitly controlling steady-state scales set by the optimizer, offering a practical recipe for width-robust hyperparameter transfer under AdamW.

We present protein autoregressive modeling (PAR), the first multi-scale autoregressive framework for protein backbone generation via coarse-to-fine next-scale prediction. Using the hierarchical nature of proteins, PAR generates structures that mimic sculpting a statue, forming a coarse topology and refining structural details over scales. To achieve this, PAR consists of three key components: (i) multi-scale downsampling operations that represent protein structures across multiple scales during training; (ii) an autoregressive transformer that encodes multi-scale information and produces conditional embeddings to guide structure generation; (iii) a flow-based backbone decoder that generates backbone atoms conditioned on these embeddings. Moreover, autoregressive models suffer from exposure bias, caused by the training and the generation procedure mismatch, and substantially degrades structure generation quality. We effectively alleviate this issue by adopting noisy context learning and scheduled sampling, enabling robust backbone generation. Notably, PAR exhibits strong zero-shot generalization, supporting flexible human-prompted conditional generation and motif scaffolding without requiring fine-tuning. On the unconditional generation benchmark, PAR effectively learns protein distributions and produces backbones of high design quality, and exhibits favorable scaling behavior. Together, these properties establish PAR as a promising framework for protein structure generation.

Transformers have become the predominant architecture in foundation models due to their excellent performance across various domains. However, the substantial cost of scaling these models remains a significant concern. This problem arises primarily from their dependence on a fixed number of parameters within linear projections. When architectural modifications (e.g., channel dimensions) are introduced, the entire model typically requires retraining from scratch. As model sizes continue growing, this strategy results in increasingly high computational costs and becomes unsustainable. To overcome this problem, we introduce TokenFormer, a natively scalable architecture that leverages the attention mechanism not only for computations among input tokens but also for interactions between tokens and model parameters, thereby enhancing architectural flexibility. By treating model parameters as tokens, we replace all the linear projections in Transformers with our token-parameter attention layer, where input tokens act as queries and model parameters as keys and values. This reformulation allows for progressive and efficient scaling without necessitating retraining from scratch. Our model scales from 124M to 1.4B parameters by incrementally adding new key-value parameter pairs, achieving performance comparable to Transformers trained from scratch while greatly reducing training costs. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Haiyang-W/TokenFormer.

Applying a pre-trained large model to downstream tasks is prohibitive under resource-constrained conditions. Recent dominant approaches for addressing efficiency issues involve adding a few learnable parameters to the fixed backbone model. This strategy, however, leads to more challenges in loading large models for downstream fine-tuning with limited resources. In this paper, we propose a novel method for increasing the parameter efficiency of pre-trained models by introducing an intermediate pre-training stage. To this end, we first employ low-rank approximation to compress the original large model and then devise a feature distillation module and a weight perturbation regularization module. These modules are specifically designed to enhance the low-rank model. In particular, we update only the low-rank model while freezing the backbone parameters during pre-training. This allows for direct and efficient utilization of the low-rank model for downstream fine-tuning tasks. The proposed method achieves both efficiencies in terms of required parameters and computation time while maintaining comparable results with minimal modifications to the backbone architecture. Specifically, when applied to three vision-only and one vision-language Transformer models, our approach often demonstrates a merely sim0.6 point decrease in performance while reducing the original parameter size by 1/3 to 2/3.

Fine-tuning large-scale Transformers has led to the explosion of many AI applications across Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision tasks. However, fine-tuning all pre-trained model parameters becomes impractical as the model size and number of tasks increase. Parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) methods aim to address these challenges. While effective in reducing the number of trainable parameters, PETL methods still require significant energy and computational resources to fine-tune. In this paper, we introduce REcurrent ADaption (READ) -- a lightweight and memory-efficient fine-tuning method -- to overcome the limitations of the current PETL approaches. Specifically, READ inserts a small RNN network alongside the backbone model so that the model does not have to back-propagate through the large backbone network. Through comprehensive empirical evaluation of the GLUE benchmark, we demonstrate READ can achieve a 56% reduction in the training memory consumption and an 84% reduction in the GPU energy usage while retraining high model quality compared to full-tuning. Additionally, the model size of READ does not grow with the backbone model size, making it a highly scalable solution for fine-tuning large Transformers.

Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on downstream tasks has been adopted in a variety of domains recently. However, it is costly to update the entire parameter set of large pre-trained models. Although recently proposed parameter-efficient transfer learning (PETL) techniques allow updating a small subset of parameters (e.g. only using 2% of parameters) inside a pre-trained backbone network for a new task, they only reduce the training memory requirement by up to 30%. This is because the gradient computation for the trainable parameters still requires backpropagation through the large pre-trained backbone model. To address this, we propose Ladder Side-Tuning (LST), a new PETL technique that can reduce training memory requirements by more substantial amounts. Unlike existing parameter-efficient methods that insert additional parameters inside backbone networks, we train a ladder side network, a small and separate network that takes intermediate activations as input via shortcut connections (called ladders) from backbone networks and makes predictions. LST has significantly lower memory requirements than previous methods, because it does not require backpropagation through the backbone network, but instead only through the side network and ladder connections. We evaluate our method with various models (T5 and CLIP-T5) on both NLP (GLUE) and vision-and-language (VQA, GQA, NLVR2 , MSCOCO) tasks. LST saves 69% of the memory costs to fine-tune the whole network, while other methods only save 26% of that in similar parameter usages (hence, 2.7x more memory savings). Moreover, LST achieves higher accuracy than Adapter and LoRA in a low-memory regime. To further show the advantage of this better memory efficiency, we also apply LST to larger T5 models, attaining better GLUE performance than full fine-tuning and other PETL methods. The accuracy-efficiency trade-off also holds on VL tasks.

Methods based on diffusion backbones have recently revolutionized novel view synthesis (NVS). However, those models require pretrained 2D diffusion checkpoints (e.g., Stable Diffusion) as the basis for geometrical priors. Since such checkpoints require exorbitant amounts of data and compute to train, this greatly limits the scalability of diffusion-based NVS models. We present Next-Scale Autoregression Conditioned by View (ArchonView), a method that significantly exceeds state-of-the-art methods despite being trained from scratch with 3D rendering data only and no 2D pretraining. We achieve this by incorporating both global (pose-augmented semantics) and local (multi-scale hierarchical encodings) conditioning into a backbone based on the next-scale autoregression paradigm. Our model also exhibits robust performance even for difficult camera poses where previous methods fail, and is several times faster in inference speed compared to diffusion. We experimentally verify that performance scales with model and dataset size, and conduct extensive demonstration of our method's synthesis quality across several tasks. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/Shiran-Yuan/ArchonView.

Representing features at multiple scales is of great importance for numerous vision tasks. Recent advances in backbone convolutional neural networks (CNNs) continually demonstrate stronger multi-scale representation ability, leading to consistent performance gains on a wide range of applications. However, most existing methods represent the multi-scale features in a layer-wise manner. In this paper, we propose a novel building block for CNNs, namely Res2Net, by constructing hierarchical residual-like connections within one single residual block. The Res2Net represents multi-scale features at a granular level and increases the range of receptive fields for each network layer. The proposed Res2Net block can be plugged into the state-of-the-art backbone CNN models, e.g., ResNet, ResNeXt, and DLA. We evaluate the Res2Net block on all these models and demonstrate consistent performance gains over baseline models on widely-used datasets, e.g., CIFAR-100 and ImageNet. Further ablation studies and experimental results on representative computer vision tasks, i.e., object detection, class activation mapping, and salient object detection, further verify the superiority of the Res2Net over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. The source code and trained models are available on https://mmcheng.net/res2net/.

It is commonly believed that scaling language models should commit a significant space or time cost, by increasing the parameters (parameter scaling) or output tokens (inference-time scaling). We introduce the third and more inference-efficient scaling paradigm: increasing the model's parallel computation during both training and inference time. We apply P diverse and learnable transformations to the input, execute forward passes of the model in parallel, and dynamically aggregate the P outputs. This method, namely parallel scaling (ParScale), scales parallel computation by reusing existing parameters and can be applied to any model structure, optimization procedure, data, or task. We theoretically propose a new scaling law and validate it through large-scale pre-training, which shows that a model with P parallel streams is similar to scaling the parameters by O(log P) while showing superior inference efficiency. For example, ParScale can use up to 22times less memory increase and 6times less latency increase compared to parameter scaling that achieves the same performance improvement. It can also recycle an off-the-shelf pre-trained model into a parallelly scaled one by post-training on a small amount of tokens, further reducing the training budget. The new scaling law we discovered potentially facilitates the deployment of more powerful models in low-resource scenarios, and provides an alternative perspective for the role of computation in machine learning.

Deep learning models like Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have revolutionized various domains, but their parameter-intensive nature hampers deployment in resource-constrained settings. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept utilizes column space and row space of weight matrices, which allows for a substantial reduction in model parameters without compromising performance. Leveraging this paradigm, we achieve parameter-efficient deep learning models.. Our approach applies to both Bottleneck and Attention layers, effectively halving the parameters while incurring only minor performance degradation. Extensive experiments conducted on the ImageNet dataset with ViT and ResNet50 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showcasing competitive performance when compared to traditional models. This approach not only addresses the pressing demand for parameter efficient deep learning solutions but also holds great promise for practical deployment in real-world scenarios.

As language models scale up, it becomes increasingly expensive to verify research ideas because conclusions on small models do not trivially transfer to large ones. A possible solution is to establish a generic system that directly predicts some metrics for large models solely based on the results and hyperparameters from small models. Existing methods based on scaling laws require hyperparameter search on the largest models, which is impractical with limited resources. We address this issue by presenting our discoveries indicating that Maximal Update parametrization (Mup) enables accurate fitting of scaling laws for hyperparameters close to common loss basins, without any search. Thus, different models can be directly compared on large scales with loss prediction even before the training starts. We propose a new paradigm as a first step towards reliable academic research for any model scale without heavy computation. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/cofe-ai/Mu-scaling.

Modern top-performing object detectors depend heavily on backbone networks, whose advances bring consistent performance gains through exploring more effective network structures. In this paper, we propose a novel and flexible backbone framework, namely CBNetV2, to construct high-performance detectors using existing open-sourced pre-trained backbones under the pre-training fine-tuning paradigm. In particular, CBNetV2 architecture groups multiple identical backbones, which are connected through composite connections. Specifically, it integrates the high- and low-level features of multiple backbone networks and gradually expands the receptive field to more efficiently perform object detection. We also propose a better training strategy with assistant supervision for CBNet-based detectors. Without additional pre-training of the composite backbone, CBNetV2 can be adapted to various backbones (CNN-based vs. Transformer-based) and head designs of most mainstream detectors (one-stage vs. two-stage, anchor-based vs. anchor-free-based). Experiments provide strong evidence that, compared with simply increasing the depth and width of the network, CBNetV2 introduces a more efficient, effective, and resource-friendly way to build high-performance backbone networks. Particularly, our Dual-Swin-L achieves 59.4% box AP and 51.6% mask AP on COCO test-dev under the single-model and single-scale testing protocol, which is significantly better than the state-of-the-art result (57.7% box AP and 50.2% mask AP) achieved by Swin-L, while the training schedule is reduced by 6times. With multi-scale testing, we push the current best single model result to a new record of 60.1% box AP and 52.3% mask AP without using extra training data. Code is available at https://github.com/VDIGPKU/CBNetV2.

Parameter Efficient Tuning (PET) has gained attention for reducing the number of parameters while maintaining performance and providing better hardware resource savings, but few studies investigate dense prediction tasks and interaction between modalities. In this paper, we do an investigation of efficient tuning problems on referring image segmentation. We propose a novel adapter called Bridger to facilitate cross-modal information exchange and inject task-specific information into the pre-trained model. We also design a lightweight decoder for image segmentation. Our approach achieves comparable or superior performance with only 1.61\% to 3.38\% backbone parameter updates, evaluated on challenging benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/kkakkkka/ETRIS.

Pre-trained models have become the preferred backbone due to the expansion of model parameters, with techniques like Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFTs) typically fixing the parameters of these models. However, pre-trained models may not always be optimal, especially when there are discrepancies between training tasks and target tasks, potentially resulting in negative transfer. To address this, we introduce KIND, which performs Knowledge INtegration and Diversion in diffusion models. KIND first integrates knowledge by decomposing parameter matrices of models using U, Sigma, and V matrices, formally inspired by singular value decomposition (SVD). Then it explicitly partitions the components of these matrices into learngenes and tailors to condense common and class-specific knowledge, respectively, through a class gate. In this way, KIND redefines traditional pre-training methods by adjusting training objectives from maximizing model performance on current tasks to condensing transferable common knowledge, leveraging the Learngene framework. We conduct experiments on ImageNet-1K and compare KIND with PEFT and other learngene methods. Results indicate that KIND achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other PEFT and learngene methods. Specifically, the images generated by KIND achieves more than 6.54 and 1.07 decrease in FID and sFID on DiT-L/2, utilizing only 45.4M trainable parameters and saving at least 35.4G FLOPs in computational cost.

Sequential learning paradigms pose challenges for gradient-based deep learning due to difficulties incorporating new data and retaining prior knowledge. While Gaussian processes elegantly tackle these problems, they struggle with scalability and handling rich inputs, such as images. To address these issues, we introduce a technique that converts neural networks from weight space to function space, through a dual parameterization. Our parameterization offers: (i) a way to scale function-space methods to large data sets via sparsification, (ii) retention of prior knowledge when access to past data is limited, and (iii) a mechanism to incorporate new data without retraining. Our experiments demonstrate that we can retain knowledge in continual learning and incorporate new data efficiently. We further show its strengths in uncertainty quantification and guiding exploration in model-based RL. Further information and code is available on the project website.

Efficient LLM pre-training requires well-tuned hyperparameters (HPs), including learning rate {\eta} and weight decay {\lambda}. We study scaling laws for HPs: formulas for how to scale HPs as we scale model size N, dataset size D, and batch size B. Recent work suggests the AdamW timescale, B/({\eta}{\lambda}D), should remain constant across training settings, and we verify the implication that optimal {\lambda} scales linearly with B, for a fixed N,D. However, as N,D scale, we show the optimal timescale obeys a precise power law in the tokens-per-parameter ratio, D/N. This law thus provides a method to accurately predict {\lambda}opt in advance of large-scale training. We also study scaling laws for optimal batch size Bopt (the B enabling lowest loss at a given N,D) and critical batch size Bcrit (the B beyond which further data parallelism becomes ineffective). In contrast with prior work, we find both Bopt and Bcrit scale as power laws in D, independent of model size, N. Finally, we analyze how these findings inform the real-world selection of Pareto-optimal N and D under dual training time and compute objectives.

The public model zoo containing enormous powerful pretrained model families (e.g., ResNet/DeiT) has reached an unprecedented scope than ever, which significantly contributes to the success of deep learning. As each model family consists of pretrained models with diverse scales (e.g., DeiT-Ti/S/B), it naturally arises a fundamental question of how to efficiently assemble these readily available models in a family for dynamic accuracy-efficiency trade-offs at runtime. To this end, we present Stitchable Neural Networks (SN-Net), a novel scalable and efficient framework for model deployment. It cheaply produces numerous networks with different complexity and performance trade-offs given a family of pretrained neural networks, which we call anchors. Specifically, SN-Net splits the anchors across the blocks/layers and then stitches them together with simple stitching layers to map the activations from one anchor to another. With only a few epochs of training, SN-Net effectively interpolates between the performance of anchors with varying scales. At runtime, SN-Net can instantly adapt to dynamic resource constraints by switching the stitching positions. Extensive experiments on ImageNet classification demonstrate that SN-Net can obtain on-par or even better performance than many individually trained networks while supporting diverse deployment scenarios. For example, by stitching Swin Transformers, we challenge hundreds of models in Timm model zoo with a single network. We believe this new elastic model framework can serve as a strong baseline for further research in wider communities.

This paper introduces a new parameterization of deep neural networks (both fully-connected and convolutional) with guaranteed ell^2 Lipschitz bounds, i.e. limited sensitivity to input perturbations. The Lipschitz guarantees are equivalent to the tightest-known bounds based on certification via a semidefinite program (SDP). We provide a ``direct'' parameterization, i.e., a smooth mapping from mathbb R^N onto the set of weights satisfying the SDP-based bound. Moreover, our parameterization is complete, i.e. a neural network satisfies the SDP bound if and only if it can be represented via our parameterization. This enables training using standard gradient methods, without any inner approximation or computationally intensive tasks (e.g. projections or barrier terms) for the SDP constraint. The new parameterization can equivalently be thought of as either a new layer type (the sandwich layer), or a novel parameterization of standard feedforward networks with parameter sharing between neighbouring layers. A comprehensive set of experiments on image classification shows that sandwich layers outperform previous approaches on both empirical and certified robust accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/acfr/LBDN.

Vision Transformer and its variants have demonstrated great potential in various computer vision tasks. But conventional vision transformers often focus on global dependency at a coarse level, which suffer from a learning challenge on global relationships and fine-grained representation at a token level. In this paper, we introduce Multi-scale Attention Fusion into transformer (MAFormer), which explores local aggregation and global feature extraction in a dual-stream framework for visual recognition. We develop a simple but effective module to explore the full potential of transformers for visual representation by learning fine-grained and coarse-grained features at a token level and dynamically fusing them. Our Multi-scale Attention Fusion (MAF) block consists of: i) a local window attention branch that learns short-range interactions within windows, aggregating fine-grained local features; ii) global feature extraction through a novel Global Learning with Down-sampling (GLD) operation to efficiently capture long-range context information within the whole image; iii) a fusion module that self-explores the integration of both features via attention. Our MAFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance on common vision tasks. In particular, MAFormer-L achieves 85.9% Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, surpassing CSWin-B and LV-ViT-L by 1.7% and 0.6% respectively. On MSCOCO, MAFormer outperforms the prior art CSWin by 1.7% mAPs on object detection and 1.4% on instance segmentation with similar-sized parameters, demonstrating the potential to be a general backbone network.

Large foundation models are typically trained on data from multiple domains, with the data mixture--the proportion of each domain used--playing a critical role in model performance. The standard approach to selecting this mixture relies on trial and error, which becomes impractical for large-scale pretraining. We propose a systematic method to determine the optimal data mixture for any target domain using scaling laws. Our approach accurately predicts the loss of a model of size N trained with D tokens and a specific domain weight vector h. We validate the universality of these scaling laws by demonstrating their predictive power in three distinct and large-scale settings: large language model (LLM), native multimodal model (NMM), and large vision models (LVM) pretraining. We further show that these scaling laws can extrapolate to new data mixtures and across scales: their parameters can be accurately estimated using a few small-scale training runs, and used to estimate the performance at larger scales and unseen domain weights. The scaling laws allow to derive the optimal domain weights for any target domain under a given training budget (N,D), providing a principled alternative to costly trial-and-error methods.

Recently, temporal action detection (TAD) has seen significant performance improvement with end-to-end training. However, due to the memory bottleneck, only models with limited scales and limited data volumes can afford end-to-end training, which inevitably restricts TAD performance. In this paper, we reduce the memory consumption for end-to-end training, and manage to scale up the TAD backbone to 1 billion parameters and the input video to 1,536 frames, leading to significant detection performance. The key to our approach lies in our proposed temporal-informative adapter (TIA), which is a novel lightweight module that reduces training memory. Using TIA, we free the humongous backbone from learning to adapt to the TAD task by only updating the parameters in TIA. TIA also leads to better TAD representation by temporally aggregating context from adjacent frames throughout the backbone. We evaluate our model across four representative datasets. Owing to our efficient design, we are able to train end-to-end on VideoMAEv2-giant and achieve 75.4% mAP on THUMOS14, being the first end-to-end model to outperform the best feature-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/sming256/AdaTAD.

Continued pretraining offers a promising solution for adapting foundation models to a new target domain. However, in specialized domains, available datasets are often very small, limiting the applicability of SSL methods developed for large-scale pretraining and making hyperparameter search infeasible. In addition, pretrained models are usually released as backbone-weights only, lacking important information to continue pretraining. We propose to bridge this gap with DIET-CP, a simple continued pretraining strategy, where any strong foundation model can be steered towards the new data distribution of interest. DIET-CP relies on a very simple objective, requires no labels, and introduces no more hyperparameters than supervised finetuning. It is stable across data modalities and backbone choices, while providing a significant performance boost for state-of-the-art models such as DINOv3 using only 1000 images.

Large foundation models have emerged in the last years and are pushing performance boundaries for a variety of tasks. Training or even finetuning such models demands vast datasets and computational resources, which are often scarce and costly. Adaptation methods provide a computationally efficient solution to address these limitations by allowing such models to be finetuned on small amounts of data and computing power. This is achieved by appending new trainable modules to frozen backbones with only a fraction of the trainable parameters and fitting only these modules on novel tasks. Recently, the VeRA adapter was shown to excel in parameter-efficient adaptations by utilizing a pair of frozen random low-rank matrices shared across all layers. In this paper, we propose PVeRA, a probabilistic version of the VeRA adapter, which modifies the low-rank matrices of VeRA in a probabilistic manner. This modification naturally allows handling inherent ambiguities in the input and allows for different sampling configurations during training and testing. A comprehensive evaluation was performed on the VTAB-1k benchmark and seven adapters, with PVeRA outperforming VeRA and other adapters. Our code for training models with PVeRA and benchmarking all adapters is available https://github.com/leofillioux/pvera.

Deep learning (DL) creates impactful advances following a virtuous recipe: model architecture search, creating large training data sets, and scaling computation. It is widely believed that growing training sets and models should improve accuracy and result in better products. As DL application domains grow, we would like a deeper understanding of the relationships between training set size, computational scale, and model accuracy improvements to advance the state-of-the-art. This paper presents a large scale empirical characterization of generalization error and model size growth as training sets grow. We introduce a methodology for this measurement and test four machine learning domains: machine translation, language modeling, image processing, and speech recognition. Our empirical results show power-law generalization error scaling across a breadth of factors, resulting in power-law exponents---the "steepness" of the learning curve---yet to be explained by theoretical work. Further, model improvements only shift the error but do not appear to affect the power-law exponent. We also show that model size scales sublinearly with data size. These scaling relationships have significant implications on deep learning research, practice, and systems. They can assist model debugging, setting accuracy targets, and decisions about data set growth. They can also guide computing system design and underscore the importance of continued computational scaling.

Organizations typically train large models individually. This is costly and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale foundation models. Such vertical production is known to be suboptimal. Inspired by this economic insight, we ask whether it is possible to leverage others' expertise by trading the constituent parts in models, i.e., sets of weights, as if they were market commodities. While recent advances in aligning and interpolating models suggest that doing so may be possible, a number of fundamental questions must be answered to create viable parameter markets. In this work, we address these basic questions, propose a framework containing the infrastructure necessary for market operations to take place, study strategies for exchanging parameters, and offer means for agents to monetize parameters. Excitingly, compared to agents who train siloed models from scratch, we show that it is possible to mutually gain by using the market, even in competitive settings. This suggests that the notion of parameter markets may be a useful paradigm for improving large-scale model training in the future.

The surge of pre-training has witnessed the rapid development of document understanding recently. Pre-training and fine-tuning framework has been effectively used to tackle texts in various formats, including plain texts, document texts, and web texts. Despite achieving promising performance, existing pre-trained models usually target one specific document format at one time, making it difficult to combine knowledge from multiple document formats. To address this, we propose XDoc, a unified pre-trained model which deals with different document formats in a single model. For parameter efficiency, we share backbone parameters for different formats such as the word embedding layer and the Transformer layers. Meanwhile, we introduce adaptive layers with lightweight parameters to enhance the distinction across different formats. Experimental results have demonstrated that with only 36.7% parameters, XDoc achieves comparable or even better performance on a variety of downstream tasks compared with the individual pre-trained models, which is cost effective for real-world deployment. The code and pre-trained models will be publicly available at https://aka.ms/xdoc.

Recent work has identified simple empirical scaling laws for language models, linking compute budget, dataset size, model size, and autoregressive modeling loss. The validity of these simple power laws across orders of magnitude in model scale provides compelling evidence that larger models are also more capable models. However, scaling up models under the constraints of hardware and infrastructure is no easy feat, and rapidly becomes a hard and expensive engineering problem. We investigate ways to tentatively cheat scaling laws, and train larger models for cheaper. We emulate an increase in effective parameters, using efficient approximations: either by doping the models with frozen random parameters, or by using fast structured transforms in place of dense linear layers. We find that the scaling relationship between test loss and compute depends only on the actual number of trainable parameters; scaling laws cannot be deceived by spurious parameters.

Click-based interactive image segmentation aims at extracting objects with a limited user clicking. A hierarchical backbone is the de-facto architecture for current methods. Recently, the plain, non-hierarchical Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a competitive backbone for dense prediction tasks. This design allows the original ViT to be a foundation model that can be finetuned for downstream tasks without redesigning a hierarchical backbone for pretraining. Although this design is simple and has been proven effective, it has not yet been explored for interactive image segmentation. To fill this gap, we propose SimpleClick, the first interactive segmentation method that leverages a plain backbone. Based on the plain backbone, we introduce a symmetric patch embedding layer that encodes clicks into the backbone with minor modifications to the backbone itself. With the plain backbone pretrained as a masked autoencoder (MAE), SimpleClick achieves state-of-the-art performance. Remarkably, our method achieves 4.15 NoC@90 on SBD, improving 21.8% over the previous best result. Extensive evaluation on medical images demonstrates the generalizability of our method. We further develop an extremely tiny ViT backbone for SimpleClick and provide a detailed computational analysis, highlighting its suitability as a practical annotation tool.

Second-order optimization has been developed to accelerate the training of deep neural networks and it is being applied to increasingly larger-scale models. In this study, towards training on further larger scales, we identify a specific parameterization for second-order optimization that promotes feature learning in a stable manner even if the network width increases significantly. Inspired by a maximal update parameterization, we consider a one-step update of the gradient and reveal the appropriate scales of hyperparameters including random initialization, learning rates, and damping terms. Our approach covers two major second-order optimization algorithms, K-FAC and Shampoo, and we demonstrate that our parameterization achieves higher generalization performance in feature learning. In particular, it enables us to transfer the hyperparameters across models with different widths.

Large artificial neural networks have become a mainstay of language, vision, and audio processing and synthesis, yet their initializations and learning rates are often set in an unsophisticated fashion, due to the high cost of hyperparameter sweeps at scale. The mu-Parameterization (muP) offers a potential solution to this challenge, yielding scaling rules for model initialization and learning rates while reportedly enabling zero-shot hyperparameter transfer from small to large models. Despite its evident promise, the muP method is not yet widely adopted, perhaps due to higher implementation complexity, many variations, or complex theoretical background. This work investigates muP empirically, focusing on the ubiquitous transformer architecture, and aims to answer a simple question: does mu-Transfer yield optimal learning rates in practice? Studying models of up to 10B parameters and training budgets of up to 190B tokens, we find mu-Transfer works as intended for the majority of important cases, yet also identify a few cases where it may not.

In this paper, we propose a new multi-scale face detector having an extremely tiny number of parameters (EXTD),less than 0.1 million, as well as achieving comparable performance to deep heavy detectors. While existing multi-scale face detectors extract feature maps with different scales from a single backbone network, our method generates the feature maps by iteratively reusing a shared lightweight and shallow backbone network. This iterative sharing of the backbone network significantly reduces the number of parameters, and also provides the abstract image semantics captured from the higher stage of the network layers to the lower-level feature map. The proposed idea is employed by various model architectures and evaluated by extensive experiments. From the experiments from WIDER FACE dataset, we show that the proposed face detector can handle faces with various scale and conditions, and achieved comparable performance to the more massive face detectors that few hundreds and tens times heavier in model size and floating point operations.

Fine-tuning pre-trained Vision Transformers (ViT) has consistently demonstrated promising performance in the realm of visual recognition. However, adapting large pre-trained models to various tasks poses a significant challenge. This challenge arises from the need for each model to undergo an independent and comprehensive fine-tuning process, leading to substantial computational and memory demands. While recent advancements in Parameter-efficient Transfer Learning (PETL) have demonstrated their ability to achieve superior performance compared to full fine-tuning with a smaller subset of parameter updates, they tend to overlook dense prediction tasks such as object detection and segmentation. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical Side-Tuning (HST), a novel PETL approach that enables ViT transfer to various downstream tasks effectively. Diverging from existing methods that exclusively fine-tune parameters within input spaces or certain modules connected to the backbone, we tune a lightweight and hierarchical side network (HSN) that leverages intermediate activations extracted from the backbone and generates multi-scale features to make predictions. To validate HST, we conducted extensive experiments encompassing diverse visual tasks, including classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and semantic segmentation. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art average Top-1 accuracy of 76.0% on VTAB-1k, all while fine-tuning a mere 0.78M parameters. When applied to object detection tasks on COCO testdev benchmark, HST even surpasses full fine-tuning and obtains better performance with 49.7 box AP and 43.2 mask AP using Cascade Mask R-CNN.

The hybrid deep models of Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolution Neural Network (CNN) have emerged as a powerful class of backbones for vision tasks. Scaling up the input resolution of such hybrid backbones naturally strengthes model capacity, but inevitably suffers from heavy computational cost that scales quadratically. Instead, we present a new hybrid backbone with HIgh-Resolution Inputs (namely HIRI-ViT), that upgrades prevalent four-stage ViT to five-stage ViT tailored for high-resolution inputs. HIRI-ViT is built upon the seminal idea of decomposing the typical CNN operations into two parallel CNN branches in a cost-efficient manner. One high-resolution branch directly takes primary high-resolution features as inputs, but uses less convolution operations. The other low-resolution branch first performs down-sampling and then utilizes more convolution operations over such low-resolution features. Experiments on both recognition task (ImageNet-1K dataset) and dense prediction tasks (COCO and ADE20K datasets) demonstrate the superiority of HIRI-ViT. More remarkably, under comparable computational cost (sim5.0 GFLOPs), HIRI-ViT achieves to-date the best published Top-1 accuracy of 84.3% on ImageNet with 448times448 inputs, which absolutely improves 83.4% of iFormer-S by 0.9% with 224times224 inputs.

Recently, diffusion- and flow-based generative models of protein structures have emerged as a powerful tool for de novo protein design. Here, we develop Proteina, a new large-scale flow-based protein backbone generator that utilizes hierarchical fold class labels for conditioning and relies on a tailored scalable transformer architecture with up to 5x as many parameters as previous models. To meaningfully quantify performance, we introduce a new set of metrics that directly measure the distributional similarity of generated proteins with reference sets, complementing existing metrics. We further explore scaling training data to millions of synthetic protein structures and explore improved training and sampling recipes adapted to protein backbone generation. This includes fine-tuning strategies like LoRA for protein backbones, new guidance methods like classifier-free guidance and autoguidance for protein backbones, and new adjusted training objectives. Proteina achieves state-of-the-art performance on de novo protein backbone design and produces diverse and designable proteins at unprecedented length, up to 800 residues. The hierarchical conditioning offers novel control, enabling high-level secondary-structure guidance as well as low-level fold-specific generation.

Scaling up model and data size has been quite successful for the evolution of LLMs. However, the scaling law for the diffusion based text-to-image (T2I) models is not fully explored. It is also unclear how to efficiently scale the model for better performance at reduced cost. The different training settings and expensive training cost make a fair model comparison extremely difficult. In this work, we empirically study the scaling properties of diffusion based T2I models by performing extensive and rigours ablations on scaling both denoising backbones and training set, including training scaled UNet and Transformer variants ranging from 0.4B to 4B parameters on datasets upto 600M images. For model scaling, we find the location and amount of cross attention distinguishes the performance of existing UNet designs. And increasing the transformer blocks is more parameter-efficient for improving text-image alignment than increasing channel numbers. We then identify an efficient UNet variant, which is 45% smaller and 28% faster than SDXL's UNet. On the data scaling side, we show the quality and diversity of the training set matters more than simply dataset size. Increasing caption density and diversity improves text-image alignment performance and the learning efficiency. Finally, we provide scaling functions to predict the text-image alignment performance as functions of the scale of model size, compute and dataset size.

Large-scale supervised pretraining is rapidly reshaping 3D medical image segmentation. However, existing efforts focus primarily on increasing dataset size and overlook the question of whether the backbone network is an effective representation learner at scale. In this work, we address this gap by revisiting ConvNeXt-based architectures for volumetric segmentation and introducing MedNeXt-v2, a compound-scaled 3D ConvNeXt that leverages improved micro-architecture and data scaling to deliver state-of-the-art performance. First, we show that routinely used backbones in large-scale pretraining pipelines are often suboptimal. Subsequently, we use comprehensive backbone benchmarking prior to scaling and demonstrate that stronger from scratch performance reliably predicts stronger downstream performance after pretraining. Guided by these findings, we incorporate a 3D Global Response Normalization module and use depth, width, and context scaling to improve our architecture for effective representation learning. We pretrain MedNeXt-v2 on 18k CT volumes and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance when fine-tuning across six challenging CT and MR benchmarks (144 structures), showing consistent gains over seven publicly released pretrained models. Beyond improvements, our benchmarking of these models also reveals that stronger backbones yield better results on similar data, representation scaling disproportionately benefits pathological segmentation, and that modality-specific pretraining offers negligible benefit once full finetuning is applied. In conclusion, our results establish MedNeXt-v2 as a strong backbone for large-scale supervised representation learning in 3D Medical Image Segmentation. Our code and pretrained models are made available with the official nnUNet repository at: https://www.github.com/MIC-DKFZ/nnUNet

Training state-of-the-art neural networks requires a high cost in terms of compute and time. Model scale is recognized to be a critical factor to achieve and improve the state-of-the-art. Increasing the scale of a neural network normally requires restarting from scratch by randomly initializing all the parameters of the model, as this implies a change of architecture's parameters that does not allow for a straightforward transfer of knowledge from smaller size models. In this work, we propose six composable transformations to incrementally increase the size of transformer-based neural networks while preserving functionality, allowing to expand the capacity of the model as needed. We provide proof of exact function preservation under minimal initialization constraints for each transformation. The proposed methods may enable efficient training pipelines for larger and more powerful models by progressively expanding the architecture throughout training.

Dense linear layers are the dominant computational bottleneck in foundation models. Identifying more efficient alternatives to dense matrices has enormous potential for building more compute-efficient models, as exemplified by the success of convolutional networks in the image domain. In this work, we systematically explore structured matrices as replacements for dense matrices. We show that different structures often require drastically different initialization scales and learning rates, which are crucial to performance, especially as models scale. Using insights from the Maximal Update Parameterization, we determine the optimal scaling for initialization and learning rates of these unconventional layers. Finally, we measure the scaling laws of different structures to compare how quickly their performance improves with compute. We propose a novel matrix family containing Monarch matrices, the Block Tensor-Train (BTT), which we show performs better than dense matrices for the same compute on multiple tasks. On CIFAR-10/100 with augmentation, BTT achieves exponentially lower training loss than dense when training MLPs and ViTs. BTT matches dense ViT-S/32 performance on ImageNet-1k with 3.8 times less compute and is more efficient than dense for training small GPT-2 language models.

3D content creation has achieved significant progress in terms of both quality and speed. Although current feed-forward models can produce 3D objects in seconds, their resolution is constrained by the intensive computation required during training. In this paper, we introduce Large Multi-View Gaussian Model (LGM), a novel framework designed to generate high-resolution 3D models from text prompts or single-view images. Our key insights are two-fold: 1) 3D Representation: We propose multi-view Gaussian features as an efficient yet powerful representation, which can then be fused together for differentiable rendering. 2) 3D Backbone: We present an asymmetric U-Net as a high-throughput backbone operating on multi-view images, which can be produced from text or single-view image input by leveraging multi-view diffusion models. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high fidelity and efficiency of our approach. Notably, we maintain the fast speed to generate 3D objects within 5 seconds while boosting the training resolution to 512, thereby achieving high-resolution 3D content generation.

Lattices are architected metamaterials whose properties strongly depend on their geometrical design. The analogy between lattices and graphs enables the use of graph neural networks (GNNs) as a faster surrogate model compared to traditional methods such as finite element modelling. In this work, we generate a big dataset of structure-property relationships for strut-based lattices. The dataset is made available to the community which can fuel the development of methods anchored in physical principles for the fitting of fourth-order tensors. In addition, we present a higher-order GNN model trained on this dataset. The key features of the model are (i) SE(3) equivariance, and (ii) consistency with the thermodynamic law of conservation of energy. We compare the model to non-equivariant models based on a number of error metrics and demonstrate its benefits in terms of predictive performance and reduced training requirements. Finally, we demonstrate an example application of the model to an architected material design task. The methods which we developed are applicable to fourth-order tensors beyond elasticity such as piezo-optical tensor etc.

Large Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across many tasks. Most open-source libraries on scaling Transformers focus on improving training or inference with better parallelization. In this work, we present TorchScale, an open-source toolkit that allows researchers and developers to scale up Transformers efficiently and effectively. TorchScale has the implementation of several modeling techniques, which can improve modeling generality and capability, as well as training stability and efficiency. Experimental results on language modeling and neural machine translation demonstrate that TorchScale can successfully scale Transformers to different sizes without tears. The library is available at https://aka.ms/torchscale.

Recent advances in visual generation have made significant strides in producing content of exceptional quality. However, most methods suffer from a fundamental problem - a bottleneck of inference computational efficiency. Most of these algorithms involve multiple passes over a transformer model to generate tokens or denoise inputs. However, the model size is kept consistent throughout all iterations, which makes it computationally expensive. In this work, we aim to address this issue primarily through two key ideas - (a) not all parts of the generation process need equal compute, and we design a decode time model scaling schedule to utilize compute effectively, and (b) we can cache and reuse some of the computation. Combining these two ideas leads to using smaller models to process more tokens while large models process fewer tokens. These different-sized models do not increase the parameter size, as they share parameters. We rigorously experiment with ImageNet256times256 , UCF101, and Kinetics600 to showcase the efficacy of the proposed method for image/video generation and frame prediction. Our experiments show that with almost 3times less compute than baseline, our model obtains competitive performance.

Modern foundation models rely heavily on using scaling laws to guide crucial training decisions. Researchers often extrapolate the optimal architecture and hyper parameters settings from smaller training runs by describing the relationship between, loss, or task performance, and scale. All components of this process vary, from the specific equation being fit, to the training setup, to the optimization method. Each of these factors may affect the fitted law, and therefore, the conclusions of a given study. We discuss discrepancies in the conclusions that several prior works reach, on questions such as the optimal token to parameter ratio. We augment this discussion with our own analysis of the critical impact that changes in specific details may effect in a scaling study, and the resulting altered conclusions. Additionally, we survey over 50 papers that study scaling trends: while 45 of these papers quantify these trends using a power law, most under-report crucial details needed to reproduce their findings. To mitigate this, we we propose a checklist for authors to consider while contributing to scaling law research.

When designing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), one must select the size\break of the convolutional kernels before training. Recent works show CNNs benefit from different kernel sizes at different layers, but exploring all possible combinations is unfeasible in practice. A more efficient approach is to learn the kernel size during training. However, existing works that learn the kernel size have a limited bandwidth. These approaches scale kernels by dilation, and thus the detail they can describe is limited. In this work, we propose FlexConv, a novel convolutional operation with which high bandwidth convolutional kernels of learnable kernel size can be learned at a fixed parameter cost. FlexNets model long-term dependencies without the use of pooling, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several sequential datasets, outperform recent works with learned kernel sizes, and are competitive with much deeper ResNets on image benchmark datasets. Additionally, FlexNets can be deployed at higher resolutions than those seen during training. To avoid aliasing, we propose a novel kernel parameterization with which the frequency of the kernels can be analytically controlled. Our novel kernel parameterization shows higher descriptive power and faster convergence speed than existing parameterizations. This leads to important improvements in classification accuracy.

Scaling laws predict the loss of a target machine learning model by extrapolating from easier-to-train models with fewer parameters or smaller training sets. This provides an efficient way for practitioners and researchers alike to compare pretraining decisions involving optimizers, datasets, and model architectures. Despite the widespread use of scaling laws to model the dynamics of language model training, there has been little work on understanding how to best estimate and interpret them. We collect (and release) a large-scale dataset containing losses and downstream evaluations for 485 previously published pretrained models. We use these to estimate more than 1000 scaling laws, then derive a set of best practices for estimating scaling laws in new model families. We find that fitting scaling laws to intermediate checkpoints of training runs (and not just their final losses) substantially improves accuracy, and that -- all else equal -- estimates of performance are generally most accurate when derived from other models of similar sizes. However, because there is a significant degree of variability across model seeds, training multiple small models is sometimes more useful than training a single large one. Moreover, while different model families differ scaling behavior, they are often similar enough that a target model's behavior can be predicted from a single model with the same architecture, along with scaling parameter estimates derived from other model families.

In the realm of self-supervised learning (SSL), conventional wisdom has gravitated towards the utility of massive, general domain datasets for pretraining robust backbones. In this paper, we challenge this idea by exploring if it is possible to bridge the scale between general-domain datasets and (traditionally smaller) domain-specific datasets to reduce the current performance gap. More specifically, we propose Precision at Scale (PaS), a novel method for the autonomous creation of domain-specific datasets on-demand. The modularity of the PaS pipeline enables leveraging state-of-the-art foundational and generative models to create a collection of images of any given size belonging to any given domain with minimal human intervention. Extensive analysis in two complex domains, proves the superiority of PaS datasets over existing traditional domain-specific datasets in terms of diversity, scale, and effectiveness in training visual transformers and convolutional neural networks. Most notably, we prove that automatically generated domain-specific datasets lead to better pretraining than large-scale supervised datasets such as ImageNet-1k and ImageNet-21k. Concretely, models trained on domain-specific datasets constructed by PaS pipeline, beat ImageNet-1k pretrained backbones by at least 12% in all the considered domains and classification tasks and lead to better food domain performance than supervised ImageNet-21k pretrain while being 12 times smaller. Code repository: https://github.com/jesusmolrdv/Precision-at-Scale/

Instruction-based image editing is among the fastest developing areas in generative AI. Over the past year, the field has reached a new level, with dozens of open-source models released alongside highly capable commercial systems. However, only a limited number of open-source approaches currently achieve real-world quality. In addition, diffusion backbones, the dominant choice for these pipelines, are often large and computationally expensive for many deployments and research settings, with widely used variants typically containing 6B to 20B parameters. This paper presents a compact, high-throughput instruction-based image editing pipeline that uses a modern 2B-parameter Qwen3-VL model to guide the editing process and the 1.6B-parameter diffusion model Sana1.5 for image generation. Our design decisions across architecture, data processing, training configuration, and evaluation target low-cost inference and strict source consistency while maintaining high quality across the major edit categories feasible at this scale. Evaluated on the ImgEdit and GEdit benchmarks, the proposed method matches or exceeds the performance of substantially heavier baselines, including models with several times as many parameters and higher inference cost, and is particularly strong on edits that require preserving the input image, such as an attribute adjustment, object removal, background edits, and targeted replacement. The model fits within 24 GB of GPU memory and generates edited images at up to 2K resolution in approximately 4 seconds on an NVIDIA H100 in BF16, without additional inference optimizations or distillation.

Research in efficient vision backbones is evolving into models that are a mixture of convolutions and transformer blocks. A smart combination of both, architecture-wise and component-wise is mandatory to excel in the speedaccuracy trade-off. Most publications focus on maximizing accuracy and utilize MACs (multiply accumulate operations) as an efficiency metric. The latter however often do not measure accurately how fast a model actually is due to factors like memory access cost and degree of parallelism. We analyzed common modules and architectural design choices for backbones not in terms of MACs, but rather in actual throughput and latency, as the combination of the latter two is a better representation of the efficiency of models in real applications. We applied the conclusions taken from that analysis to create a recipe for increasing hardware-efficiency in macro design. Additionally we introduce a simple slimmed-down version of MultiHead Self-Attention, that aligns with our analysis. We combine both macro and micro design to create a new family of hardware-efficient backbone networks called LowFormer. LowFormer achieves a remarkable speedup in terms of throughput and latency, while achieving similar or better accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient backbones. In order to prove the generalizability of our hardware-efficient design, we evaluate our method on GPU, mobile GPU and ARM CPU. We further show that the downstream tasks object detection and semantic segmentation profit from our hardware-efficient architecture. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ altair199797/LowFormer.

Numerical simulations in climate, chemistry, or astrophysics are computationally too expensive for uncertainty quantification or parameter-exploration at high-resolution. Reduced-order or surrogate models are multiple orders of magnitude faster, but traditional surrogates are inflexible or inaccurate and pure machine learning (ML)-based surrogates too data-hungry. We propose a hybrid, flexible surrogate model that exploits known physics for simulating large-scale dynamics and limits learning to the hard-to-model term, which is called parametrization or closure and captures the effect of fine- onto large-scale dynamics. Leveraging neural operators, we are the first to learn grid-independent, non-local, and flexible parametrizations. Our multiscale neural operator is motivated by a rich literature in multiscale modeling, has quasilinear runtime complexity, is more accurate or flexible than state-of-the-art parametrizations and demonstrated on the chaotic equation multiscale Lorenz96.

Scaling up neural networks has led to remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. Moreover, performance often follows reliable scaling laws as a function of training set size, model size, and compute, which offers valuable guidance as large-scale experiments are becoming increasingly expensive. However, previous work on scaling laws has primarily used private data \& models or focused on uni-modal language or vision learning. To address these limitations, we investigate scaling laws for contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) with the public LAION dataset and the open-source OpenCLIP repository. Our large-scale experiments involve models trained on up to two billion image-text pairs and identify power law scaling for multiple downstream tasks including zero-shot classification, retrieval, linear probing, and end-to-end fine-tuning. We find that the training distribution plays a key role in scaling laws as the OpenAI and OpenCLIP models exhibit different scaling behavior despite identical model architectures and similar training recipes. We open-source our evaluation workflow and all models, including the largest public CLIP models, to ensure reproducibility and make scaling laws research more accessible. Source code and instructions to reproduce this study will be available at https://github.com/LAION-AI/scaling-laws-openclip

The population loss of trained deep neural networks often follows precise power-law scaling relations with either the size of the training dataset or the number of parameters in the network. We propose a theory that explains the origins of and connects these scaling laws. We identify variance-limited and resolution-limited scaling behavior for both dataset and model size, for a total of four scaling regimes. The variance-limited scaling follows simply from the existence of a well-behaved infinite data or infinite width limit, while the resolution-limited regime can be explained by positing that models are effectively resolving a smooth data manifold. In the large width limit, this can be equivalently obtained from the spectrum of certain kernels, and we present evidence that large width and large dataset resolution-limited scaling exponents are related by a duality. We exhibit all four scaling regimes in the controlled setting of large random feature and pretrained models and test the predictions empirically on a range of standard architectures and datasets. We also observe several empirical relationships between datasets and scaling exponents under modifications of task and architecture aspect ratio. Our work provides a taxonomy for classifying different scaling regimes, underscores that there can be different mechanisms driving improvements in loss, and lends insight into the microscopic origins of and relationships between scaling exponents.

We study the problem of visualizing large-scale and high-dimensional data in a low-dimensional (typically 2D or 3D) space. Much success has been reported recently by techniques that first compute a similarity structure of the data points and then project them into a low-dimensional space with the structure preserved. These two steps suffer from considerable computational costs, preventing the state-of-the-art methods such as the t-SNE from scaling to large-scale and high-dimensional data (e.g., millions of data points and hundreds of dimensions). We propose the LargeVis, a technique that first constructs an accurately approximated K-nearest neighbor graph from the data and then layouts the graph in the low-dimensional space. Comparing to t-SNE, LargeVis significantly reduces the computational cost of the graph construction step and employs a principled probabilistic model for the visualization step, the objective of which can be effectively optimized through asynchronous stochastic gradient descent with a linear time complexity. The whole procedure thus easily scales to millions of high-dimensional data points. Experimental results on real-world data sets demonstrate that the LargeVis outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. The hyper-parameters of LargeVis are also much more stable over different data sets.

Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network. However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones pretrained using various algorithms and datasets. While this abundance of choice has led to performance increases for a range of systems, it is difficult for practitioners to make informed decisions about which backbone to choose. Battle of the Backbones (BoB) makes this choice easier by benchmarking a diverse suite of pretrained models, including vision-language models, those trained via self-supervised learning, and the Stable Diffusion backbone, across a diverse set of computer vision tasks ranging from classification to object detection to OOD generalization and more. Furthermore, BoB sheds light on promising directions for the research community to advance computer vision by illuminating strengths and weakness of existing approaches through a comprehensive analysis conducted on more than 1500 training runs. While vision transformers (ViTs) and self-supervised learning (SSL) are increasingly popular, we find that convolutional neural networks pretrained in a supervised fashion on large training sets still perform best on most tasks among the models we consider. Moreover, in apples-to-apples comparisons on the same architectures and similarly sized pretraining datasets, we find that SSL backbones are highly competitive, indicating that future works should perform SSL pretraining with advanced architectures and larger pretraining datasets. We release the raw results of our experiments along with code that allows researchers to put their own backbones through the gauntlet here: https://github.com/hsouri/Battle-of-the-Backbones

Neural scaling laws define a predictable relationship between a model's parameter count and its performance after training in the form of a power law. However, most research to date has not explicitly investigated whether scaling laws can be used to accelerate model development. In this work, we perform such an empirical investigation across a wide range of language understanding tasks, starting from models with as few as 10K parameters, and evaluate downstream performance across 9 language understanding tasks. We find that scaling laws emerge at finetuning time in some NLP tasks, and that they can also be exploited for debugging convergence when training large models. Moreover, for tasks where scaling laws exist, they can be used to predict the performance of larger models, which enables effective model selection. However, revealing scaling laws requires careful hyperparameter tuning and multiple runs for the purpose of uncertainty estimation, which incurs additional overhead, partially offsetting the computational benefits.

Widely observed neural scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training set size, model size, or both, have driven substantial performance improvements in deep learning. However, these improvements through scaling alone require considerable costs in compute and energy. Here we focus on the scaling of error with dataset size and show how in theory we can break beyond power law scaling and potentially even reduce it to exponential scaling instead if we have access to a high-quality data pruning metric that ranks the order in which training examples should be discarded to achieve any pruned dataset size. We then test this improved scaling prediction with pruned dataset size empirically, and indeed observe better than power law scaling in practice on ResNets trained on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. Next, given the importance of finding high-quality pruning metrics, we perform the first large-scale benchmarking study of ten different data pruning metrics on ImageNet. We find most existing high performing metrics scale poorly to ImageNet, while the best are computationally intensive and require labels for every image. We therefore developed a new simple, cheap and scalable self-supervised pruning metric that demonstrates comparable performance to the best supervised metrics. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of good data-pruning metrics may provide a viable path forward to substantially improved neural scaling laws, thereby reducing the resource costs of modern deep learning.

Recently, efficient fine-tuning of large-scale pre-trained models has attracted increasing research interests, where linear probing (LP) as a fundamental module is involved in exploiting the final representations for task-dependent classification. However, most of the existing methods focus on how to effectively introduce a few of learnable parameters, and little work pays attention to the commonly used LP module. In this paper, we propose a novel Moment Probing (MP) method to further explore the potential of LP. Distinguished from LP which builds a linear classification head based on the mean of final features (e.g., word tokens for ViT) or classification tokens, our MP performs a linear classifier on feature distribution, which provides the stronger representation ability by exploiting richer statistical information inherent in features. Specifically, we represent feature distribution by its characteristic function, which is efficiently approximated by using first- and second-order moments of features. Furthermore, we propose a multi-head convolutional cross-covariance (MHC^3) to compute second-order moments in an efficient and effective manner. By considering that MP could affect feature learning, we introduce a partially shared module to learn two recalibrating parameters (PSRP) for backbones based on MP, namely MP_{+}. Extensive experiments on ten benchmarks using various models show that our MP significantly outperforms LP and is competitive with counterparts at less training cost, while our MP_{+} achieves state-of-the-art performance.

The impressive capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse tasks are now well-established, yet their effective deployment necessitates careful hyperparameter optimization. Through extensive empirical studies involving grid searches across diverse configurations, we discover universal scaling laws governing these hyperparameters: optimal learning rate follows a power-law relationship with both model parameters and data sizes, while optimal batch size scales primarily with data sizes. Our analysis reveals a convex optimization landscape for hyperparameters under fixed models and data size conditions. This convexity implies an optimal hyperparameter plateau. We contribute a universal, plug-and-play optimal hyperparameter tool for the community. Its estimated values on the test set are merely 0.07\% away from the globally optimal LLM performance found via an exhaustive search. These laws demonstrate remarkable robustness across variations in model sparsity, training data distribution, and model shape. To our best known, this is the first work that unifies different model shapes and structures, such as Mixture-of-Experts models and dense transformers, as well as establishes optimal hyperparameter scaling laws across diverse data distributions. This exhaustive optimization process demands substantial computational resources, utilizing nearly one million NVIDIA H800 GPU hours to train 3,700 LLMs of varying sizes and hyperparameters from scratch and consuming approximately 100 trillion tokens in total. To facilitate reproducibility and further research, we will progressively release all loss measurements and model checkpoints through our designated repository https://step-law.github.io/

When considering a model architecture, there are several ways to reduce its memory footprint. Historically, popular approaches included selecting smaller architectures and creating sparse networks through pruning. More recently, randomized parameter-sharing (RPS) methods have gained traction for model compression at start of training. In this paper, we comprehensively assess the trade-off between memory and accuracy across RPS, pruning techniques, and building smaller models. Our findings demonstrate that RPS, which is both data and model-agnostic, consistently outperforms/matches smaller models and all moderately informed pruning strategies, such as MAG, SNIP, SYNFLOW, and GRASP, across the entire compression range. This advantage becomes particularly pronounced in higher compression scenarios. Notably, even when compared to highly informed pruning techniques like Lottery Ticket Rewinding (LTR), RPS exhibits superior performance in high compression settings. This points out inherent capacity advantage that RPS enjoys over sparse models. Theoretically, we establish RPS as a superior technique in terms of memory-efficient representation when compared to pruning for linear models. This paper argues in favor of paradigm shift towards RPS based models. During our rigorous evaluation of RPS, we identified issues in the state-of-the-art RPS technique ROAST, specifically regarding stability (ROAST's sensitivity to initialization hyperparameters, often leading to divergence) and Pareto-continuity (ROAST's inability to recover the accuracy of the original model at zero compression). We provably address both of these issues. We refer to the modified RPS, which incorporates our improvements, as STABLE-RPS.

The Maximal Update Parametrization (muP) aims to make the optimal hyperparameters (HPs) of a model independent of its size, allowing them to be swept using a cheap proxy model rather than the full-size target model. We present a new scheme, u-muP, which improves upon muP by combining it with Unit Scaling, a method for designing models that makes them easy to train in low-precision. The two techniques have a natural affinity: muP ensures that the scale of activations is independent of model size, and Unit Scaling ensures that activations, weights and gradients begin training with a scale of one. This synthesis opens the door to a simpler scheme, whose default values are near-optimal. This in turn facilitates a more efficient sweeping strategy, with u-muP models reaching a lower loss than comparable muP models and working out-of-the-box in FP8.

Foundation models pre-trained on large-scale natural image datasets offer a powerful paradigm for medical image segmentation. However, effectively transferring their learned representations for precise clinical applications remains a challenge. In this work, we propose Dino U-Net, a novel encoder-decoder architecture designed to exploit the high-fidelity dense features of the DINOv3 vision foundation model. Our architecture introduces an encoder built upon a frozen DINOv3 backbone, which employs a specialized adapter to fuse the model's rich semantic features with low-level spatial details. To preserve the quality of these representations during dimensionality reduction, we design a new fidelity-aware projection module (FAPM) that effectively refines and projects the features for the decoder. We conducted extensive experiments on seven diverse public medical image segmentation datasets. Our results show that Dino U-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance, consistently outperforming previous methods across various imaging modalities. Our framework proves to be highly scalable, with segmentation accuracy consistently improving as the backbone model size increases up to the 7-billion-parameter variant. The findings demonstrate that leveraging the superior, dense-pretrained features from a general-purpose foundation model provides a highly effective and parameter-efficient approach to advance the accuracy of medical image segmentation. The code is available at https://github.com/yifangao112/DinoUNet.

Scaling law principles indicate a power-law correlation between loss and variables such as model size, dataset size, and computational resources utilized during training. These principles play a vital role in optimizing various aspects of model pre-training, ultimately contributing to the success of large language models such as GPT-4, Llama and Gemini. However, the original scaling law paper by OpenAI did not disclose the complete details necessary to derive the precise scaling law formulas, and their conclusions are only based on models containing up to 1.5 billion parameters. Though some subsequent works attempt to unveil these details and scale to larger models, they often neglect the training dependency of important factors such as the learning rate, context length and batch size, leading to their failure to establish a reliable formula for predicting the test loss trajectory. In this technical report, we confirm that the scaling law formulations proposed in the original OpenAI paper remain valid when scaling the model size up to 33 billion, but the constant coefficients in these formulas vary significantly with the experiment setup. We meticulously identify influential factors and provide transparent, step-by-step instructions to estimate all constant terms in scaling-law formulas by training on models with only 1M~60M parameters. Using these estimated formulas, we showcase the capability to accurately predict various attributes for models with up to 33B parameters before their training, including (1) the minimum possible test loss; (2) the minimum required training steps and processed tokens to achieve a specific loss; (3) the critical batch size with an optimal time/computation trade-off at any loss value; and (4) the complete test loss trajectory with arbitrary batch size.

Foundation models, or large atomistic models (LAMs), aim to universally represent the ground-state potential energy surface (PES) of atomistic systems as defined by density functional theory (DFT). The scaling law is pivotal in the development of large models, suggesting that their generalizability in downstream tasks consistently improves with increased model size, expanded training datasets, and larger computational budgets. In this study, we present DPA3, a multi-layer graph neural network founded on line graph series (LiGS), designed explicitly for the era of LAMs. We demonstrate that the generalization error of the DPA3 model adheres to the scaling law. The scalability in the number of model parameters is attained by stacking additional layers within DPA3. Additionally, the model employs a dataset encoding mechanism that decouples the scaling of training data size from the model size within its multi-task training framework. When trained as problem-oriented potential energy models, the DPA3 model exhibits superior accuracy in the majority of benchmark cases, encompassing systems with diverse features, including molecules, bulk materials, surface and cluster catalysts, two-dimensional materials, and battery materials. When trained as a LAM on the OpenLAM-v1 dataset, the DPA-3.1-3M model exhibits state-of-the-art performance in the LAMBench benchmark suite for LAMs, demonstrating lowest overall zero-shot generalization error across 17 downstream tasks from a broad spectrum of research domains. This performance suggests superior accuracy as an out-of-the-box potential model, requiring minimal fine-tuning data for downstream scientific applications.

In heterogeneous multi-task decision-making, tasks not only exhibit diverse observation and action spaces but also vary substantially in their underlying complexities. While conventional multi-task world models like UniZero excel in single-task settings, we find that when handling a broad and diverse suite of tasks, gradient conflicts and the loss of model plasticity often constrain their sample efficiency. In this work, we address these challenges from two complementary perspectives: the single learning iteration and the overall learning process. First, to mitigate the gradient conflicts, we systematically investigate key architectural designs for extending UniZero. Our investigation identifies a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture as the most effective approach. We demonstrate, both theoretically and empirically, that this architecture alleviates gradient conflicts by routing task-specific representations to specialized sub-networks. This finding leads to our proposed model, ScaleZero. Second, to dynamically allocate model capacity throughout the learning process, we introduce an online Dynamic Parameter Scaling (DPS) strategy. This strategy progressively integrates LoRA adapters in response to task-specific progress, enabling adaptive knowledge retention and parameter expansion. Evaluations on a diverse set of standard benchmarks (Atari, DMC, Jericho) demonstrate that ScaleZero, utilizing solely online reinforcement learning with one model, performs on par with specialized single-task agents. With the DPS strategy, it remains competitive while using just 71.5% of the environment interactions. These findings underscore the potential of ScaleZero for effective multi-task planning. Our code is available at magenta{https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero}.

We introduce Virtual Width Networks (VWN), a framework that delivers the benefits of wider representations without incurring the quadratic cost of increasing the hidden size. VWN decouples representational width from backbone width, expanding the embedding space while keeping backbone compute nearly constant. In our large-scale experiment, an 8-times expansion accelerates optimization by over 2 times for next-token and 3 times for next-2-token prediction. The advantage amplifies over training as both the loss gap grows and the convergence-speedup ratio increases, showing that VWN is not only token-efficient but also increasingly effective with scale. Moreover, we identify an approximately log-linear scaling relation between virtual width and loss reduction, offering an initial empirical basis and motivation for exploring virtual-width scaling as a new dimension of large-model efficiency.

We study compute efficiency of LLM training when using different parameterizations, i.e., rules for adjusting model and optimizer hyperparameters (HPs) as model size changes. Some parameterizations fail to transfer optimal base HPs (such as learning rate) across changes in model depth, requiring practitioners to either re-tune these HPs as they scale up (expensive), or accept sub-optimal training when re-tuning is prohibitive. Even when they achieve HP transfer, we develop theory to show parameterizations may still exist in the lazy learning regime where layers learn only features close to their linearization, preventing effective use of depth and nonlinearity. Finally, we identify and adopt the parameterization we call CompleteP that achieves both depth-wise HP transfer and non-lazy learning in all layers. CompleteP enables a wider range of model width/depth ratios to remain compute-efficient, unlocking shapes better suited for different hardware settings and operational contexts. Moreover, CompleteP enables 12-34% compute efficiency improvements over the prior state-of-the-art.

We present Ring-1T, the first open-source, state-of-the-art thinking model with a trillion-scale parameter. It features 1 trillion total parameters and activates approximately 50 billion per token. Training such models at a trillion-parameter scale introduces unprecedented challenges, including train-inference misalignment, inefficiencies in rollout processing, and bottlenecks in the RL system. To address these, we pioneer three interconnected innovations: (1) IcePop stabilizes RL training via token-level discrepancy masking and clipping, resolving instability from training-inference mismatches; (2) C3PO++ improves resource utilization for long rollouts under a token budget by dynamically partitioning them, thereby obtaining high time efficiency; and (3) ASystem, a high-performance RL framework designed to overcome the systemic bottlenecks that impede trillion-parameter model training. Ring-1T delivers breakthrough results across critical benchmarks: 93.4 on AIME-2025, 86.72 on HMMT-2025, 2088 on CodeForces, and 55.94 on ARC-AGI-v1. Notably, it attains a silver medal-level result on the IMO-2025, underscoring its exceptional reasoning capabilities. By releasing the complete 1T parameter MoE model to the community, we provide the research community with direct access to cutting-edge reasoning capabilities. This contribution marks a significant milestone in democratizing large-scale reasoning intelligence and establishes a new baseline for open-source model performance.

The scaling hypothesis motivates the expansion of models past trillions of parameters as a path towards better performance. Recent significant developments, such as GPT-3, have been driven by this conjecture. However, as models scale-up, training them efficiently with backpropagation becomes difficult. Because model, pipeline, and data parallelism distribute parameters and gradients over compute nodes, communication is challenging to orchestrate: this is a bottleneck to further scaling. In this work, we argue that alternative training methods can mitigate these issues, and can inform the design of extreme-scale training hardware. Indeed, using a synaptically asymmetric method with a parallelizable backward pass, such as Direct Feedback Alignement, communication needs are drastically reduced. We present a photonic accelerator for Direct Feedback Alignment, able to compute random projections with trillions of parameters. We demonstrate our system on benchmark tasks, using both fully-connected and graph convolutional networks. Our hardware is the first architecture-agnostic photonic co-processor for training neural networks. This is a significant step towards building scalable hardware, able to go beyond backpropagation, and opening new avenues for deep learning.

We present a class of efficient models called MobileNets for mobile and embedded vision applications. MobileNets are based on a streamlined architecture that uses depth-wise separable convolutions to build light weight deep neural networks. We introduce two simple global hyper-parameters that efficiently trade off between latency and accuracy. These hyper-parameters allow the model builder to choose the right sized model for their application based on the constraints of the problem. We present extensive experiments on resource and accuracy tradeoffs and show strong performance compared to other popular models on ImageNet classification. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of MobileNets across a wide range of applications and use cases including object detection, finegrain classification, face attributes and large scale geo-localization.

In the last three years, the largest dense deep learning models have grown over 1000x to reach hundreds of billions of parameters, while the GPU memory has only grown by 5x (16 GB to 80 GB). Therefore, the growth in model scale has been supported primarily though system innovations that allow large models to fit in the aggregate GPU memory of multiple GPUs. However, we are getting close to the GPU memory wall. It requires 800 NVIDIA V100 GPUs just to fit a trillion parameter model for training, and such clusters are simply out of reach for most data scientists. In addition, training models at that scale requires complex combinations of parallelism techniques that puts a big burden on the data scientists to refactor their model. In this paper we present ZeRO-Infinity, a novel heterogeneous system technology that leverages GPU, CPU, and NVMe memory to allow for unprecedented model scale on limited resources without requiring model code refactoring. At the same time it achieves excellent training throughput and scalability, unencumbered by the limited CPU or NVMe bandwidth. ZeRO-Infinity can fit models with tens and even hundreds of trillions of parameters for training on current generation GPU clusters. It can be used to fine-tune trillion parameter models on a single NVIDIA DGX-2 node, making large models more accessible. In terms of training throughput and scalability, it sustains over 25 petaflops on 512 NVIDIA V100 GPUs(40% of peak), while also demonstrating super linear scalability. An open source implementation of ZeRO-Infinity is available through DeepSpeed, a deep learning optimization library that makes distributed training easy, efficient, and effective.

Scaling laws offer valuable insights into the design of time series foundation models (TSFMs). However, previous research has largely focused on the scaling laws of TSFMs for in-distribution (ID) data, leaving their out-of-distribution (OOD) scaling behavior and the influence of model architectures less explored. In this work, we examine two common TSFM architectures, encoder-only and decoder-only Transformers, and investigate their scaling behavior on both ID and OOD data. These models are trained and evaluated across varying parameter counts, compute budgets, and dataset sizes. Our experiments reveal that the log-likelihood loss of TSFMs exhibits similar scaling behavior in both OOD and ID settings. We further compare the scaling properties across different architectures, incorporating two state-of-the-art TSFMs as case studies, showing that model architecture plays a significant role in scaling. The encoder-only Transformers demonstrate better scalability than the decoder-only Transformers, while the architectural enhancements in the two advanced TSFMs primarily improve ID performance but reduce OOD scalability. While scaling up TSFMs is expected to drive performance breakthroughs, the lack of a comprehensive understanding of TSFM scaling laws has hindered the development of a robust framework to guide model scaling. We fill this gap in this work by synthesizing our findings and providing practical guidelines for designing and scaling larger TSFMs with enhanced model capabilities.

Spider webs are incredible biological structures, comprising thin but strong silk filament and arranged into complex hierarchical architectures with striking mechanical properties (e.g., lightweight but high strength, achieving diverse mechanical responses). While simple 2D orb webs can easily be mimicked, the modeling and synthesis of 3D-based web structures remain challenging, partly due to the rich set of design features. Here we provide a detailed analysis of the heterogenous graph structures of spider webs, and use deep learning as a way to model and then synthesize artificial, bio-inspired 3D web structures. The generative AI models are conditioned based on key geometric parameters (including average edge length, number of nodes, average node degree, and others). To identify graph construction principles, we use inductive representation sampling of large experimentally determined spider web graphs, to yield a dataset that is used to train three conditional generative models: 1) An analog diffusion model inspired by nonequilibrium thermodynamics, with sparse neighbor representation, 2) a discrete diffusion model with full neighbor representation, and 3) an autoregressive transformer architecture with full neighbor representation. All three models are scalable, produce complex, de novo bio-inspired spider web mimics, and successfully construct graphs that meet the design objectives. We further propose algorithm that assembles web samples produced by the generative models into larger-scale structures based on a series of geometric design targets, including helical and parametric shapes, mimicking, and extending natural design principles towards integration with diverging engineering objectives. Several webs are manufactured using 3D printing and tested to assess mechanical properties.

Structural pruning enables model acceleration by removing structurally-grouped parameters from neural networks. However, the parameter-grouping patterns vary widely across different models, making architecture-specific pruners, which rely on manually-designed grouping schemes, non-generalizable to new architectures. In this work, we study a highly-challenging yet barely-explored task, any structural pruning, to tackle general structural pruning of arbitrary architecture like CNNs, RNNs, GNNs and Transformers. The most prominent obstacle towards this goal lies in the structural coupling, which not only forces different layers to be pruned simultaneously, but also expects all removed parameters to be consistently unimportant, thereby avoiding structural issues and significant performance degradation after pruning. To address this problem, we propose a general and {fully automatic} method, Dependency Graph (DepGraph), to explicitly model the dependency between layers and comprehensively group coupled parameters for pruning. In this work, we extensively evaluate our method on several architectures and tasks, including ResNe(X)t, DenseNet, MobileNet and Vision transformer for images, GAT for graph, DGCNN for 3D point cloud, alongside LSTM for language, and demonstrate that, even with a simple norm-based criterion, the proposed method consistently yields gratifying performances.

In this paper, we propose a novel learning paradigm, termed Chain-of-Model (CoM), which incorporates the causal relationship into the hidden states of each layer as a chain style, thereby introducing great scaling efficiency in model training and inference flexibility in deployment. We introduce the concept of Chain-of-Representation (CoR), which formulates the hidden states at each layer as a combination of multiple sub-representations (i.e., chains) at the hidden dimension level. In each layer, each chain from the output representations can only view all of its preceding chains in the input representations. Consequently, the model built upon CoM framework can progressively scale up the model size by increasing the chains based on the previous models (i.e., chains), and offer multiple sub-models at varying sizes for elastic inference by using different chain numbers. Based on this principle, we devise Chain-of-Language-Model (CoLM), which incorporates the idea of CoM into each layer of Transformer architecture. Based on CoLM, we further introduce CoLM-Air by introducing a KV sharing mechanism, that computes all keys and values within the first chain and then shares across all chains. This design demonstrates additional extensibility, such as enabling seamless LM switching, prefilling acceleration and so on. Experimental results demonstrate our CoLM family can achieve comparable performance to the standard Transformer, while simultaneously enabling greater flexiblity, such as progressive scaling to improve training efficiency and offer multiple varying model sizes for elastic inference, paving a a new way toward building language models. Our code will be released in the future at: https://github.com/microsoft/CoLM.

Large models represent a groundbreaking advancement in multiple application fields, enabling remarkable achievements across various tasks. However, their unprecedented scale comes with significant computational costs. These models, often consisting of billions of parameters, require vast amounts of computational resources for execution. Especially, the expansive scale and computational demands pose considerable challenges when customizing them for particular downstream tasks, particularly over the hardware platforms constrained by computational capabilities. Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) provides a practical solution by efficiently adapt the large models over the various downstream tasks. In particular, PEFT refers to the process of adjusting the parameters of a pre-trained large models to adapt it to a specific task while minimizing the number of additional parameters introduced or computational resources required. This approach is particularly important when dealing with large language models with high parameter counts, as fine-tuning these models from scratch can be computationally expensive and resource-intensive, posing considerable challenges in the supporting system platform design. In this survey, we present comprehensive studies of various PEFT algorithms, examining their performance and computational overhead. Moreover, we provide an overview of applications developed using different PEFT algorithms and discuss common techniques employed to mitigate computation costs for PEFT. In addition to the algorithmic perspective, we overview various real-world system designs to investigate the implementation costs associated with different PEFT algorithms. This survey serves as an indispensable resource for researchers aiming to understand both the PEFT algorithm and its system implementation, offering detailed insights into recent advancements and practical applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) represent a significant stride toward Artificial General Intelligence. As scaling laws underscore the potential of increasing model sizes, the academic community has intensified its investigations into LLMs with capacities exceeding 50 billion parameters. This technical report builds on our prior work with Tele-FLM (also known as FLM-2), a publicly available 52-billion-parameter model. We delve into two primary areas: we first discuss our observation of Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) on Tele-FLM-52B, which supports the "less is more" approach for SFT data construction; second, we demonstrate our experiments and analyses on the best practices for progressively growing a model from 52 billion to 102 billion, and subsequently to 1 trillion parameters. We will open-source a 1T model checkpoint, namely Tele-FLM-1T, to advance further training and research.

More transformer blocks with residual connections have recently achieved impressive results on various tasks. To achieve better performance with fewer trainable parameters, recent methods are proposed to go shallower by parameter sharing or model compressing along with the depth. However, weak modeling capacity limits their performance. Contrastively, going wider by inducing more trainable matrixes and parameters would produce a huge model requiring advanced parallelism to train and inference. In this paper, we propose a parameter-efficient framework, going wider instead of deeper. Specially, following existing works, we adapt parameter sharing to compress along depth. But, such deployment would limit the performance. To maximize modeling capacity, we scale along model width by replacing feed-forward network (FFN) with mixture-of-experts (MoE). Across transformer blocks, instead of sharing normalization layers, we propose to use individual layernorms to transform various semantic representations in a more parameter-efficient way. To evaluate our plug-and-run framework, we design WideNet and conduct comprehensive experiments on popular computer vision and natural language processing benchmarks. On ImageNet-1K, our best model outperforms Vision Transformer (ViT) by 1.5% with 0.72 times trainable parameters. Using 0.46 times and 0.13 times parameters, our WideNet can still surpass ViT and ViT-MoE by 0.8% and 2.1%, respectively. On four natural language processing datasets, WideNet outperforms ALBERT by 1.8% on average and surpass BERT using factorized embedding parameterization by 0.8% with fewer parameters.

Parallel LLM inference scaling involves sampling a set of N>1 responses for a single input prompt. However, these N parallel responses tend to be generated independently from each other, partitioning compute resources and leaving potentially useful information in one generation untapped by others. This is in contrast to response length scaling where past computation is used in all future steps. For higher quality responses and response sets, we propose Bridge to generate interdependent responses in parallel by rethinking batched LLM hidden states as holistic tensors rather than independent slices. With only a small amount (2.8%-5.1%) of new parameters, Bridge improves the relative mean accuracy gains from reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards by up to 50% and boosts consistency of correct responses. Trained once, Bridge scales to any generation width, all with greater performance than independent generations, unlocking a more general mode of parallel scaling that effectively leverages information between sequences, compatible with any post-generation aggregation technique.

Scaling deep learning models has been at the heart of recent revolutions in language modelling and image generation. Practitioners have observed a strong relationship between model size, dataset size, and performance. However, structure-based architectures such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are yet to show the benefits of scale mainly due to the lower efficiency of sparse operations, large data requirements, and lack of clarity about the effectiveness of various architectures. We address this drawback of GNNs by studying their scaling behavior. Specifically, we analyze message-passing networks, graph Transformers, and hybrid architectures on the largest public collection of 2D molecular graphs. For the first time, we observe that GNNs benefit tremendously from the increasing scale of depth, width, number of molecules, number of labels, and the diversity in the pretraining datasets, resulting in a 30.25% improvement when scaling to 1 billion parameters and 28.98% improvement when increasing size of dataset to eightfold. We further demonstrate strong finetuning scaling behavior on 38 tasks, outclassing previous large models. We hope that our work paves the way for an era where foundational GNNs drive pharmaceutical drug discovery.

ImageNet serves as the primary dataset for evaluating the quality of computer-vision models. The common practice today is training each architecture with a tailor-made scheme, designed and tuned by an expert. In this paper, we present a unified scheme for training any backbone on ImageNet. The scheme, named USI (Unified Scheme for ImageNet), is based on knowledge distillation and modern tricks. It requires no adjustments or hyper-parameters tuning between different models, and is efficient in terms of training times. We test USI on a wide variety of architectures, including CNNs, Transformers, Mobile-oriented and MLP-only. On all models tested, USI outperforms previous state-of-the-art results. Hence, we are able to transform training on ImageNet from an expert-oriented task to an automatic seamless routine. Since USI accepts any backbone and trains it to top results, it also enables to perform methodical comparisons, and identify the most efficient backbones along the speed-accuracy Pareto curve. Implementation is available at:https://github.com/Alibaba-MIIL/Solving_ImageNet

Topological data analysis (TDA) is an area of data science that focuses on using invariants from algebraic topology to provide multiscale shape descriptors for geometric data sets such as point clouds. One of the most important such descriptors is {\em persistent homology}, which encodes the change in shape as a filtration parameter changes; a typical parameter is the feature scale. For many data sets, it is useful to simultaneously vary multiple filtration parameters, for example feature scale and density. While the theoretical properties of single parameter persistent homology are well understood, less is known about the multiparameter case. In particular, a central question is the problem of representing multiparameter persistent homology by elements of a vector space for integration with standard machine learning algorithms. Existing approaches to this problem either ignore most of the multiparameter information to reduce to the one-parameter case or are heuristic and potentially unstable in the face of noise. In this article, we introduce a new general representation framework that leverages recent results on {\em decompositions} of multiparameter persistent homology. This framework is rich in information, fast to compute, and encompasses previous approaches. Moreover, we establish theoretical stability guarantees under this framework as well as efficient algorithms for practical computation, making this framework an applicable and versatile tool for analyzing geometric and point cloud data. We validate our stability results and algorithms with numerical experiments that demonstrate statistical convergence, prediction accuracy, and fast running times on several real data sets.

In diffusion models, UNet is the most popular network backbone, since its long skip connects (LSCs) to connect distant network blocks can aggregate long-distant information and alleviate vanishing gradient. Unfortunately, UNet often suffers from unstable training in diffusion models which can be alleviated by scaling its LSC coefficients smaller. However, theoretical understandings of the instability of UNet in diffusion models and also the performance improvement of LSC scaling remain absent yet. To solve this issue, we theoretically show that the coefficients of LSCs in UNet have big effects on the stableness of the forward and backward propagation and robustness of UNet. Specifically, the hidden feature and gradient of UNet at any layer can oscillate and their oscillation ranges are actually large which explains the instability of UNet training. Moreover, UNet is also provably sensitive to perturbed input, and predicts an output distant from the desired output, yielding oscillatory loss and thus oscillatory gradient. Besides, we also observe the theoretical benefits of the LSC coefficient scaling of UNet in the stableness of hidden features and gradient and also robustness. Finally, inspired by our theory, we propose an effective coefficient scaling framework ScaleLong that scales the coefficients of LSC in UNet and better improves the training stability of UNet. Experimental results on four famous datasets show that our methods are superior to stabilize training and yield about 1.5x training acceleration on different diffusion models with UNet or UViT backbones. Code: https://github.com/sail-sg/ScaleLong

Convolutional neural networks typically encode an input image into a series of intermediate features with decreasing resolutions. While this structure is suited to classification tasks, it does not perform well for tasks requiring simultaneous recognition and localization (e.g., object detection). The encoder-decoder architectures are proposed to resolve this by applying a decoder network onto a backbone model designed for classification tasks. In this paper, we argue encoder-decoder architecture is ineffective in generating strong multi-scale features because of the scale-decreased backbone. We propose SpineNet, a backbone with scale-permuted intermediate features and cross-scale connections that is learned on an object detection task by Neural Architecture Search. Using similar building blocks, SpineNet models outperform ResNet-FPN models by ~3% AP at various scales while using 10-20% fewer FLOPs. In particular, SpineNet-190 achieves 52.5% AP with a MaskR-CNN detector and achieves 52.1% AP with a RetinaNet detector on COCO for a single model without test-time augmentation, significantly outperforms prior art of detectors. SpineNet can transfer to classification tasks, achieving 5% top-1 accuracy improvement on a challenging iNaturalist fine-grained dataset. Code is at: https://github.com/tensorflow/tpu/tree/master/models/official/detection.

Large language models deliver strong reasoning and tool-use skills, yet their computational demands make them impractical for edge or cost-sensitive deployments. We present Xmodel-2.5, a 1.3-billion-parameter small language model designed as a drop-in agent core. Training with maximal-update parameterization (μP) allows hyper-parameters tuned on a 20M-parameter proxy to transfer directly to the full model, even under the parameter-tied tie-word-embedding architecture. A 1.4T-token Warmup--Stable--Decay curriculum is used, and we further show that switching from AdamW to Muon during the decay phase improves the 13-task reasoning average by 4.58\,\% while keeping every other hyper-parameter fixed, verifying that early AdamW stability can be paired with late Muon sharpening for better downstream performance. FP8-mixed-precision training balances accuracy and throughput. All checkpoints, recipes, and evaluation code are released under the Apache-2.0 license.https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5 and https://huggingface.co/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5-history (training checkpoints). Training code and evaluation harness: https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/Xmodel-2.5.

The scientific scale-up of large language models (LLMs) necessitates a comprehensive understanding of their scaling properties. However, the existing literature on the scaling properties only yields an incomplete answer: optimization loss decreases predictably as the model size increases, in line with established scaling law; yet no scaling law for task has been established and the task performances are far from predictable during scaling. Task performances typically show minor gains on small models until they improve dramatically once models exceed a size threshold, exemplifying the ``emergent abilities''. In this study, we discover that small models, although they exhibit minor performance, demonstrate critical and consistent task performance improvements that are not captured by conventional evaluation strategies due to insufficient measurement resolution. To measure such improvements, we introduce PassUntil, an evaluation strategy through massive sampling in the decoding phase. We conduct quantitative investigations into the scaling law of task performance. Firstly, a strict task scaling law is identified, enhancing the predictability of task performances. Remarkably, we are able to predict the performance of the 2.4B model on code generation with merely 0.05\% deviation before training starts. Secondly, underpinned by PassUntil, we observe concrete evidence of emergent abilities and ascertain that they are not in conflict with the continuity of performance improvement. Their semblance to break-through is that their scaling curve cannot be fitted by standard scaling law function. We then introduce a mathematical definition for the emergent abilities. Through the definition, we refute a prevalent ``multi-step reasoning hypothesis'' regarding the genesis of emergent abilities and propose a new hypothesis with a satisfying fit to the observed scaling curve.

Global climate models (GCMs) are the main tools for understanding and predicting climate change. However, due to limited numerical resolutions, these models suffer from major structural uncertainties; e.g., they cannot resolve critical processes such as small-scale eddies in atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. Thus, such small-scale processes have to be represented as a function of the resolved scales via closures (parametrization). The accuracy of these closures is particularly important for capturing climate extremes. Traditionally, such closures are based on heuristics and simplifying assumptions about the unresolved physics. Recently, supervised-learned closures, trained offline on high-fidelity data, have been shown to outperform the classical physics-based closures. However, this approach requires a significant amount of high-fidelity training data and can also lead to instabilities. Reinforcement learning is emerging as a potent alternative for developing such closures as it requires only low-order statistics and leads to stable closures. In Scientific Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) computational elements serve a dual role of discretization points and learning agents. We leverage SMARL and fundamentals of turbulence physics to learn closures for prototypes of atmospheric and oceanic turbulence. The policy is trained using only the enstrophy spectrum, which is nearly invariant and can be estimated from a few high-fidelity samples (these few samples are far from enough for supervised/offline learning). We show that these closures lead to stable low-resolution simulations that, at a fraction of the cost, can reproduce the high-fidelity simulations' statistics, including the tails of the probability density functions. The results demonstrate the high potential of SMARL for closure modeling for GCMs, especially in the regime of scarce data and indirect observations.

Many recently trained neural networks employ large numbers of parameters to achieve good performance. One may intuitively use the number of parameters required as a rough gauge of the difficulty of a problem. But how accurate are such notions? How many parameters are really needed? In this paper we attempt to answer this question by training networks not in their native parameter space, but instead in a smaller, randomly oriented subspace. We slowly increase the dimension of this subspace, note at which dimension solutions first appear, and define this to be the intrinsic dimension of the objective landscape. The approach is simple to implement, computationally tractable, and produces several suggestive conclusions. Many problems have smaller intrinsic dimensions than one might suspect, and the intrinsic dimension for a given dataset varies little across a family of models with vastly different sizes. This latter result has the profound implication that once a parameter space is large enough to solve a problem, extra parameters serve directly to increase the dimensionality of the solution manifold. Intrinsic dimension allows some quantitative comparison of problem difficulty across supervised, reinforcement, and other types of learning where we conclude, for example, that solving the inverted pendulum problem is 100 times easier than classifying digits from MNIST, and playing Atari Pong from pixels is about as hard as classifying CIFAR-10. In addition to providing new cartography of the objective landscapes wandered by parameterized models, the method is a simple technique for constructively obtaining an upper bound on the minimum description length of a solution. A byproduct of this construction is a simple approach for compressing networks, in some cases by more than 100 times.

Self-supervised image backbones can be used to address complex 2D tasks (e.g., semantic segmentation, object discovery) very efficiently and with little or no downstream supervision. Ideally, 3D backbones for lidar should be able to inherit these properties after distillation of these powerful 2D features. The most recent methods for image-to-lidar distillation on autonomous driving data show promising results, obtained thanks to distillation methods that keep improving. Yet, we still notice a large performance gap when measuring the quality of distilled and fully supervised features by linear probing. In this work, instead of focusing only on the distillation method, we study the effect of three pillars for distillation: the 3D backbone, the pretrained 2D backbones, and the pretraining dataset. In particular, thanks to our scalable distillation method named ScaLR, we show that scaling the 2D and 3D backbones and pretraining on diverse datasets leads to a substantial improvement of the feature quality. This allows us to significantly reduce the gap between the quality of distilled and fully-supervised 3D features, and to improve the robustness of the pretrained backbones to domain gaps and perturbations.

Large Language Model training with 8-bit floating point (FP8) formats promises significant efficiency improvements, but reduced numerical precision makes training challenging. It is currently possible to train in FP8 only if one is willing to tune various hyperparameters, reduce model scale, or accept the overhead of computing dynamic scale factors. We demonstrate simple, scalable FP8 training that requires no dynamic scaling factors or special hyperparameters, even at large model sizes. Our method, munit Scaling (muS), also enables simple hyperparameter transfer across model widths, matched numerics across training and inference, and other desirable properties. munit Scaling is straightforward to implement, consisting of a set of minimal interventions based on a first-principles analysis of common transformer operations. We validate our method by training models from 1B to 13B parameters, performing all hidden linear layer computations in FP8. We achieve quality equal to higher precision baselines while also training up to 33% faster.

The scaling laws and extraordinary performance of large foundation models motivate the development and utilization of such models in biomedicine. However, despite early promising results on some biomedical benchmarks, there are still major challenges that need to be addressed before these models can be used in real-world clinics. Frontier general-domain models such as GPT-4V still have significant performance gaps in multimodal biomedical applications. More importantly, less-acknowledged pragmatic issues, including accessibility, model cost, and tedious manual evaluation make it hard for clinicians to use state-of-the-art large models directly on private patient data. Here, we explore training open-source small multimodal models (SMMs) to bridge competency gaps for unmet clinical needs in radiology. To maximize data efficiency, we adopt a modular approach by incorporating state-of-the-art pre-trained models for image and text modalities, and focusing on training a lightweight adapter to ground each modality to the text embedding space, as exemplified by LLaVA-Med. For training, we assemble a large dataset of over 697 thousand radiology image-text pairs. For evaluation, we propose CheXprompt, a GPT-4-based metric for factuality evaluation, and demonstrate its parity with expert evaluation. For best practice, we conduct a systematic ablation study on various choices in data engineering and multimodal training. The resulting LlaVA-Rad (7B) model attains state-of-the-art results on standard radiology tasks such as report generation and cross-modal retrieval, even outperforming much larger models such as GPT-4V and Med-PaLM M (84B). The inference of LlaVA-Rad is fast and can be performed on a single V100 GPU in private settings, offering a promising state-of-the-art tool for real-world clinical applications.

In this work, we present a panoramic metric depth foundation model that generalizes across diverse scene distances. We explore a data-in-the-loop paradigm from the view of both data construction and framework design. We collect a large-scale dataset by combining public datasets, high-quality synthetic data from our UE5 simulator and text-to-image models, and real panoramic images from the web. To reduce domain gaps between indoor/outdoor and synthetic/real data, we introduce a three-stage pseudo-label curation pipeline to generate reliable ground truth for unlabeled images. For the model, we adopt DINOv3-Large as the backbone for its strong pre-trained generalization, and introduce a plug-and-play range mask head, sharpness-centric optimization, and geometry-centric optimization to improve robustness to varying distances and enforce geometric consistency across views. Experiments on multiple benchmarks (e.g., Stanford2D3D, Matterport3D, and Deep360) demonstrate strong performance and zero-shot generalization, with particularly robust and stable metric predictions in diverse real-world scenes. The project page can be found at: https://insta360-research-team.github.io/DAP_website/ {https://insta360-research-team.github.io/DAP\_website/}

Multi-task learning (MTL) has shown considerable practical benefits, particularly when using pre-trained language models (PLMs). While this is commonly achieved by simultaneously learning n tasks under a joint optimization procedure, recent methods such as AdapterFusion structure the problem into two distinct stages: (i) task learning, where knowledge specific to a task is encapsulated within sets of parameters (\eg adapters), and (ii) transfer, where this already learned knowledge is leveraged for a target task. This separation of concerns provides numerous benefits, such as promoting reusability, and addressing cases involving data privacy and societal concerns; on the flip side, current two-stage MTL methods come with the cost of introducing a substantial number of additional parameters. In this work, we address this issue by leveraging the usefulness of linearly scaling the output representations of source adapters for transfer learning. We introduce ScaLearn, a simple and highly parameter-efficient two-stage MTL method that capitalizes on the knowledge of the source tasks by learning a minimal set of scaling parameters that enable effective knowledge transfer to a target task. Our experiments on three benchmarks (GLUE, SuperGLUE, and HumSet) show that our ScaLearn, in addition to facilitating the benefits of two-stage MTL, consistently outperforms strong baselines with only a small number of transfer parameters - roughly 0.35% of those of AdapterFusion. Remarkably, we observe that ScaLearn maintains its strong abilities even when further reducing parameters through uniform scaling and layer-sharing, achieving similarly competitive results with only 8 transfer parameters for each target task. Our proposed approach thus demonstrates the power of simple scaling as a promise for more efficient task transfer.

Scaling laws play an instrumental role in the sustainable improvement in model quality. Unfortunately, recommendation models to date do not exhibit such laws similar to those observed in the domain of large language models, due to the inefficiencies of their upscaling mechanisms. This limitation poses significant challenges in adapting these models to increasingly more complex real-world datasets. In this paper, we propose an effective network architecture based purely on stacked factorization machines, and a synergistic upscaling strategy, collectively dubbed Wukong, to establish a scaling law in the domain of recommendation. Wukong's unique design makes it possible to capture diverse, any-order of interactions simply through taller and wider layers. We conducted extensive evaluations on six public datasets, and our results demonstrate that Wukong consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models quality-wise. Further, we assessed Wukong's scalability on an internal, large-scale dataset. The results show that Wukong retains its superiority in quality over state-of-the-art models, while holding the scaling law across two orders of magnitude in model complexity, extending beyond 100 Gflop or equivalently up to GPT-3/LLaMa-2 scale of total training compute, where prior arts fall short.

Training large-scale models under given resources requires careful design of parallelism strategies. In particular, the efficiency notion of critical batch size (CBS), concerning the compromise between time and compute, marks the threshold beyond which greater data parallelism leads to diminishing returns. To operationalize it, we propose a measure of CBS and pre-train a series of auto-regressive language models, ranging from 85 million to 1.2 billion parameters, on the C4 dataset. Through extensive hyper-parameter sweeps and careful control of factors such as batch size, momentum, and learning rate along with its scheduling, we systematically investigate the impact of scale on CBS. Then we fit scaling laws with respect to model and data sizes to decouple their effects. Overall, our results demonstrate that CBS scales primarily with data size rather than model size, a finding we justify theoretically through the analysis of infinite-width limits of neural networks and infinite-dimensional least squares regression. Of independent interest, we highlight the importance of common hyper-parameter choices and strategies for studying large-scale pre-training beyond fixed training durations.

One of the main challenges in optimal scaling of large language models (LLMs) is the prohibitive cost of hyperparameter tuning, particularly learning rate eta and batch size B. While techniques like muP (Yang et al., 2022) provide scaling rules for optimal eta transfer in the infinite model size limit, the optimal scaling behavior in the infinite data size limit remains unknown. We fill in this gap by observing for the first time an intricate dependence of optimal eta scaling on the pretraining token budget T, B and its relation to the critical batch size B_crit, which we measure to evolve as B_crit propto T. Furthermore, we show that the optimal batch size is positively correlated with B_crit: keeping it fixed becomes suboptimal over time even if learning rate is scaled optimally. Surprisingly, our results demonstrate that the observed optimal eta and B dynamics are preserved with muP model scaling, challenging the conventional view of B_crit dependence solely on loss value. Complementing optimality, we examine the sensitivity of loss to changes in learning rate, where we find the sensitivity to decrease with increase of T and to remain constant with muP model scaling. We hope our results make the first step towards a unified picture of the joint optimal data and model scaling.

This paper delves into the interplay between vision backbones and optimizers, unvealing an inter-dependent phenomenon termed \textbf{backbone-optimizer coupling bias} (BOCB). We observe that canonical CNNs, such as VGG and ResNet, exhibit a marked co-dependency with SGD families, while recent architectures like ViTs and ConvNeXt share a tight coupling with the adaptive learning rate ones. We further show that BOCB can be introduced by both optimizers and certain backbone designs and may significantly impact the pre-training and downstream fine-tuning of vision models. Through in-depth empirical analysis, we summarize takeaways on recommended optimizers and insights into robust vision backbone architectures. We hope this work can inspire the community to question long-held assumptions on backbones and optimizers, stimulate further explorations, and thereby contribute to more robust vision systems. The source code and models are publicly available at https://bocb-ai.github.io/.

Scaling up the size of vision models has been the de facto standard to obtain more powerful visual representations. In this work, we discuss the point beyond which larger vision models are not necessary. First, we demonstrate the power of Scaling on Scales (S^2), whereby a pre-trained and frozen smaller vision model (e.g., ViT-B or ViT-L), run over multiple image scales, can outperform larger models (e.g., ViT-H or ViT-G) on classification, segmentation, depth estimation, Multimodal LLM (MLLM) benchmarks, and robotic manipulation. Notably, S^2 achieves state-of-the-art performance in detailed understanding of MLLM on the V* benchmark, surpassing models such as GPT-4V. We examine the conditions under which S^2 is a preferred scaling approach compared to scaling on model size. While larger models have the advantage of better generalization on hard examples, we show that features of larger vision models can be well approximated by those of multi-scale smaller models. This suggests most, if not all, of the representations learned by current large pre-trained models can also be obtained from multi-scale smaller models. Our results show that a multi-scale smaller model has comparable learning capacity to a larger model, and pre-training smaller models with S^2 can match or even exceed the advantage of larger models. We release a Python package that can apply S^2 on any vision model with one line of code: https://github.com/bfshi/scaling_on_scales.

We present an online post-hoc calibration method, called Online Platt Scaling (OPS), which combines the Platt scaling technique with online logistic regression. We demonstrate that OPS smoothly adapts between i.i.d. and non-i.i.d. settings with distribution drift. Further, in scenarios where the best Platt scaling model is itself miscalibrated, we enhance OPS by incorporating a recently developed technique called calibeating to make it more robust. Theoretically, our resulting OPS+calibeating method is guaranteed to be calibrated for adversarial outcome sequences. Empirically, it is effective on a range of synthetic and real-world datasets, with and without distribution drifts, achieving superior performance without hyperparameter tuning. Finally, we extend all OPS ideas to the beta scaling method.

Scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on increasing the number of parameters or test-time computations to boost performance. However, these strategies are impractical for edge device deployment due to limited RAM and NPU resources. Despite hardware constraints, deploying performant LLM on edge devices such as smartphone remains crucial for user experience. To address this, we propose MeKi (Memory-based Expert Knowledge Injection), a novel system that scales LLM capacity via storage space rather than FLOPs. MeKi equips each Transformer layer with token-level memory experts that injects pre-stored semantic knowledge into the generation process. To bridge the gap between training capacity and inference efficiency, we employ a re-parameterization strategy to fold parameter matrices used during training into a compact static lookup table. By offloading the knowledge to ROM, MeKi decouples model capacity from computational cost, introducing zero inference latency overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MeKi significantly outperforms dense LLM baselines with identical inference speed, validating the effectiveness of memory-based scaling paradigm for on-device LLMs. Project homepage is at https://github.com/ningding-o/MeKi.

Foundation models are rapidly being developed for computational pathology applications. However, it remains an open question which factors are most important for downstream performance with data scale and diversity, model size, and training algorithm all playing a role. In this work, we present the result of scaling both data and model size, surpassing previous studies in both dimensions, and introduce two new models: Virchow 2, a 632M parameter vision transformer, and Virchow 2G, a 1.85B parameter vision transformer, each trained with 3.1M histopathology whole slide images. To support this scale, we propose domain-inspired adaptations to the DINOv2 training algorithm, which is quickly becoming the default method in self-supervised learning for computational pathology. We achieve state of the art performance on twelve tile-level tasks, as compared to the top performing competing models. Our results suggest that data diversity and domain-specific training can outperform models that only scale in the number of parameters, but, on average, performance benefits from domain-tailoring, data scale, and model scale.

Optimizing recommender systems for objectives beyond accuracy, such as diversity, novelty, and personalization, is crucial for long-term user satisfaction. To this end, industrial practitioners have accumulated vast amounts of structured domain knowledge, which we term human priors (e.g., item taxonomies, temporal patterns). This knowledge is typically applied through post-hoc adjustments during ranking or post-ranking. However, this approach remains decoupled from the core model learning, which is particularly undesirable as the industry shifts to end-to-end generative recommendation foundation models. On the other hand, many methods targeting these beyond-accuracy objectives often require architecture-specific modifications and discard these valuable human priors by learning user intent in a fully unsupervised manner. Instead of discarding the human priors accumulated over years of practice, we introduce a backbone-agnostic framework that seamlessly integrates these human priors directly into the end-to-end training of generative recommenders. With lightweight, prior-conditioned adapter heads inspired by efficient LLM decoding strategies, our approach guides the model to disentangle user intent along human-understandable axes (e.g., interaction types, long- vs. short-term interests). We also introduce a hierarchical composition strategy for modeling complex interactions across different prior types. Extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method significantly enhances both accuracy and beyond-accuracy objectives. We also show that human priors allow the backbone model to more effectively leverage longer context lengths and larger model sizes.

The ability to quickly and accurately compute properties from atomic simulations is critical for advancing a large number of applications in chemistry and materials science including drug discovery, energy storage, and semiconductor manufacturing. To address this need, Meta FAIR presents a family of Universal Models for Atoms (UMA), designed to push the frontier of speed, accuracy, and generalization. UMA models are trained on half a billion unique 3D atomic structures (the largest training runs to date) by compiling data across multiple chemical domains, e.g. molecules, materials, and catalysts. We develop empirical scaling laws to help understand how to increase model capacity alongside dataset size to achieve the best accuracy. The UMA small and medium models utilize a novel architectural design we refer to as mixture of linear experts that enables increasing model capacity without sacrificing speed. For example, UMA-medium has 1.4B parameters but only ~50M active parameters per atomic structure. We evaluate UMA models on a diverse set of applications across multiple domains and find that, remarkably, a single model without any fine-tuning can perform similarly or better than specialized models. We are releasing the UMA code, weights, and associated data to accelerate computational workflows and enable the community to continue to build increasingly capable AI models.

Large-scale models pre-trained on large-scale datasets have profoundly advanced the development of deep learning. However, the state-of-the-art models for medical image segmentation are still small-scale, with their parameters only in the tens of millions. Further scaling them up to higher orders of magnitude is rarely explored. An overarching goal of exploring large-scale models is to train them on large-scale medical segmentation datasets for better transfer capacities. In this work, we design a series of Scalable and Transferable U-Net (STU-Net) models, with parameter sizes ranging from 14 million to 1.4 billion. Notably, the 1.4B STU-Net is the largest medical image segmentation model to date. Our STU-Net is based on nnU-Net framework due to its popularity and impressive performance. We first refine the default convolutional blocks in nnU-Net to make them scalable. Then, we empirically evaluate different scaling combinations of network depth and width, discovering that it is optimal to scale model depth and width together. We train our scalable STU-Net models on a large-scale TotalSegmentator dataset and find that increasing model size brings a stronger performance gain. This observation reveals that a large model is promising in medical image segmentation. Furthermore, we evaluate the transferability of our model on 14 downstream datasets for direct inference and 3 datasets for further fine-tuning, covering various modalities and segmentation targets. We observe good performance of our pre-trained model in both direct inference and fine-tuning. The code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/Ziyan-Huang/STU-Net.

Recent work has shown that deep reinforcement learning agents have difficulty in effectively using their network parameters. We leverage prior insights into the advantages of sparse training techniques and demonstrate that gradual magnitude pruning enables agents to maximize parameter effectiveness. This results in networks that yield dramatic performance improvements over traditional networks and exhibit a type of "scaling law", using only a small fraction of the full network parameters.

Expressive human pose and shape estimation (EHPS) unifies body, hands, and face motion capture with numerous applications. Despite encouraging progress, current state-of-the-art methods focus on training innovative architectural designs on confined datasets. In this work, we investigate the impact of scaling up EHPS towards a family of generalist foundation models. 1) For data scaling, we perform a systematic investigation on 40 EHPS datasets, encompassing a wide range of scenarios that a model trained on any single dataset cannot handle. More importantly, capitalizing on insights obtained from the extensive benchmarking process, we optimize our training scheme and select datasets that lead to a significant leap in EHPS capabilities. Ultimately, we achieve diminishing returns at 10M training instances from diverse data sources. 2) For model scaling, we take advantage of vision transformers (up to ViT-Huge as the backbone) to study the scaling law of model sizes in EHPS. To exclude the influence of algorithmic design, we base our experiments on two minimalist architectures: SMPLer-X, which consists of an intermediate step for hand and face localization, and SMPLest-X, an even simpler version that reduces the network to its bare essentials and highlights significant advances in the capture of articulated hands. With big data and the large model, the foundation models exhibit strong performance across diverse test benchmarks and excellent transferability to even unseen environments. Moreover, our finetuning strategy turns the generalist into specialist models, allowing them to achieve further performance boosts. Notably, our foundation models consistently deliver state-of-the-art results on seven benchmarks such as AGORA, UBody, EgoBody, and our proposed SynHand dataset for comprehensive hand evaluation. (Code is available at: https://github.com/wqyin/SMPLest-X).

In studies of transferable learning, scaling laws are obtained for various important foundation models to predict their properties and performance at larger scales. We show here how scaling law derivation can also be used for model and dataset comparison, allowing to decide which procedure is to be preferred for pre-training. For the first time, full scaling laws based on dense measurements across a wide span of model and samples seen scales are derived for two important language-vision learning procedures, CLIP and MaMMUT, that use either contrastive only or contrastive and captioning text generative loss. Ensuring sufficient prediction accuracy for held out points, we use derived scaling laws to compare both models, obtaining evidence for MaMMUT's stronger improvement with scale and better sample efficiency than standard CLIP. To strengthen validity of the comparison, we show scaling laws for various downstream tasks, classification, retrieval, and segmentation, and for different open datasets, DataComp, DFN and Re-LAION, observing consistently the same trends. We show that comparison can also be performed when deriving scaling laws with a constant learning rate schedule, reducing compute cost. Accurate derivation of scaling laws provides thus means to perform model and dataset comparison across scale spans, avoiding misleading conclusions based on measurements from single reference scales only, paving the road for systematic comparison and improvement of open foundation models and datasets for their creation. We release all the pre-trained models with their intermediate checkpoints, including openMaMMUT-L/14, which achieves 80.3% zero-shot ImageNet-1k accuracy, trained on 12.8B samples from DataComp-1.4B. Code for reproducing experiments in the paper and raw experiments data can be found at https://github.com/LAION-AI/scaling-laws-for-comparison.