Abstract:Improving the inference efficiency of autoregressive transformers typically means reducing FLOPs per token, usually through approximations that degrade model quality. We introduce N-vium, a mixture-of-exits transformer that partially parallelizes computation across depth on standard hardware, increasing effective FLOPs per second rather than minimizing compute per token. N-vium attaches prediction heads at multiple depths and defines the next-token distribution as a learned mixture over these exits, with token-adaptive routing. This formulation strictly generalizes the standard transformer, which is recovered exactly when routing assigns zero mass to all intermediate heads. Sampling from the mixture is exact, and complete KV caches are recovered by deferring the upper-layer computation and batching it with later tokens. We pretrain N-vium at scales up to 1.5B parameters. Our largest model reaches 57.9% wall-clock speedup over a parameter- and data-matched standard transformer at no perplexity cost.
Abstract:Message-passing based approaches form the default backbone of most learning architectures on graph-structured data. However, the rapid progress of modern deep learning architectures in other domains, particularly sequence modeling, raises the question of how graph learning can benefit from these advances. We introduce Linearized Graph Sequence Models, a framework that recasts message-passing graph computation from the perspective of sequence modeling to simplify architectural choices. Our approach systematically separates the computational processing depth from the information propagation depth, allowing core graph architectural decisions to be treated as sequence modeling choices. Specifically, we analyze, both empirically and theoretically, what sequence properties make methods effective for learning and preserving the graph inductive bias. In particular, we validate our findings, demonstrating improved performance on long-range information tasks in graphs. Our findings provide a principled way to integrate modern sequence modeling advances into message-passing based graph learning. Beyond this, our work demonstrates how the separation of processing and information depth can recast central architectural questions as input modeling choices.
Abstract:Automatic speech recognition (ASR) performs well for high-resource languages with abundant paired audio-transcript data, but its accuracy degrades sharply for most languages due to limited publicly available aligned data. To this end, we introduce WorldSpeech, a 24 kHz multilingual speech corpus comprising 65k hours of aligned audio-transcript data across 76 languages, collected from diverse public sources including parliamentary proceedings, international broadcasts, and public-domain audiobooks. For 37 languages, WorldSpeech provides more than 200 hours of aligned speech, with 28 exceeding 500 hours and 24 surpassing 1k hours. Fine-tuning existing ASR models on WorldSpeech results in an average relative Word-Error-Rate reduction of 63.5% across 11 typologically diverse languages.
Abstract:Opinion modeling aims to capture individual or group political preferences, enabling applications such as digital democracies, where models could help shape fairer and more popular policies. Given their versatility, strong generalization capabilities, and demonstrated success across diverse text-to-text applications, large language models (LLMs) are natural candidates for this task. However, due to their statistical nature and limited causal understanding, they tend to produce biased opinions when prompted naively. In this work, we study whether reasoning can improve opinion alignment. Motivated by the recent advancement in mathematical reasoning enabled by reinforcement learning (RL), we train models to produce profile-consistent answers through structured reasoning. We evaluate our approach on three datasets covering U.S., European, and Swiss politics. Results indicate that reasoning enhances opinion modeling and is competitive with strong baselines, but does not fully remove bias, highlighting the need for additional mechanisms to build faithful political digital twins using LLMs. By releasing both our method and datasets, we establish a solid baseline to support future research on LLM opinion alignment.
Abstract:As AI systems approach superhuman capabilities, scalable oversight increasingly relies on LLM-as-a-judge frameworks where models evaluate and guide each other's training. A core assumption is that binary preference labels provide only semantic supervision about response quality. We challenge this assumption by demonstrating that preference labels can function as a covert communication channel. We show that even when a neutral student model generates semantically unbiased completions, a biased judge can transmit unintended behavioral traits through preference assignments, which even strengthen across iterative alignment rounds. Our findings suggest that robust oversight in superalignment settings requires mechanisms that can detect and mitigate subliminal preference transmission, particularly when judges may pursue unintended objectives.
Abstract:Large language models are increasingly deployed as cooperating agents, yet their behavior in adversarial consensus settings has not been systematically studied. We evaluate LLM-based agents on a Byzantine consensus game over scalar values using a synchronous all-to-all simulation. We test consensus in a no-stake setting where agents have no preferences over the final value, so evaluation focuses on agreement rather than value optimality. Across hundreds of simulations spanning model sizes, group sizes, and Byzantine fractions, we find that valid agreement is not reliable even in benign settings and degrades as group size grows. Introducing a small number of Byzantine agents further reduces success. Failures are dominated by loss of liveness, such as timeouts and stalled convergence, rather than subtle value corruption. Overall, the results suggest that reliable agreement is not yet a dependable emergent capability of current LLM-agent groups even in no-stake settings, raising caution for deployments that rely on robust coordination.
Abstract:Tokenization is a hardcoded compression step which remains in the training pipeline of Large Language Models (LLMs), despite a general trend towards architectures becoming increasingly end-to-end. Prior work has shown promising results at scale in bringing this compression step inside the LLMs' architecture with heuristics to draw token boundaries, and also attempts to learn these token boundaries with straight-through estimates, which treat the problem of drawing discrete token boundaries as a continuous one. We show that these token boundaries can instead be learned using score function estimates, which have tighter theoretical guarantees due to directly optimizing the problem of drawing discrete token boundaries to minimize loss. We observe that techniques from reinforcement learning, such as time discounting, are necessary to reduce the variance of this score function sufficiently to make it practicable. We demonstrate that the resultant method outperforms prior proposed straight-through estimates, both qualitatively and quantitatively at the $100$ million parameter scale.
Abstract:As AI agents powered by large language models (LLMs) increasingly use external tools for high-stakes decisions, a critical reliability question arises: how do errors propagate across sequential tool calls? We introduce the first theoretical framework for analyzing error accumulation in Model Context Protocol (MCP) agents, proving that cumulative distortion exhibits linear growth and high-probability deviations bounded by $O(\sqrt{T})$. This concentration property ensures predictable system behavior and rules out exponential failure modes. We develop a hybrid distortion metric combining discrete fact matching with continuous semantic similarity, then establish martingale concentration bounds on error propagation through sequential tool interactions. Experiments across Qwen2-7B, Llama-3-8B, and Mistral-7B validate our theoretical predictions, showing empirical distortion tracks the linear trend with deviations consistently within $O(\sqrt{T})$ envelopes. Key findings include: semantic weighting reduces distortion by 80\%, and periodic re-grounding approximately every 9 steps suffices for error control. We translate these concentration guarantees into actionable deployment principles for trustworthy agent systems.
Abstract:Machine learning approaches to solving Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) aim to replace handcrafted heuristics with learning-based models. Graph Neural Networks have emerged as the main architecture for SAT solving, due to the natural graph representation of Boolean formulas. We analyze the expressive power of GNNs for SAT solving through the lens of the Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) test. As our main result, we prove that the full WL hierarchy cannot, in general, distinguish between satisfiable and unsatisfiable instances. We show that indistinguishability under higher-order WL carries over to practical limitations for WL-bounded solvers that set variables sequentially. We further study the expressivity required for several important families of SAT instances, including regular, random and planar instances. To quantify expressivity needs in practice, we conduct experiments on random instances from the G4SAT benchmark and industrial instances from the International SAT Competition. Our results suggest that while random instances are largely distinguishable, industrial instances often require more expressivity to predict a satisfying assignment.
Abstract:The energy and latency costs of deep neural network inference are increasingly driven by deployment rather than training, motivating hardware-specialized alternatives to arithmetic-heavy models. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) provide an attractive substrate for such specialization, yet existing FPGA-based neural approaches are fragmented and difficult to compare. We present BitLogic, a fully gradient-based, end-to-end trainable framework for FPGA-native neural networks built around Lookup Table (LUT) computation. BitLogic replaces multiply-accumulate operations with differentiable LUT nodes that map directly to FPGA primitives, enabling native binary computation, sparse connectivity, and efficient hardware realization. The framework offers a modular functional API supporting diverse architectures, along with learned encoders, hardware-aware heads, and multiple boundary-consistent LUT relaxations. An automated Register Transfer Level (RTL) export pipeline translates trained PyTorch models into synthesizable HDL, ensuring equivalence between software and hardware inference. Experiments across standard vision benchmarks and heterogeneous hardware platforms demonstrate competitive accuracy and substantial gains in FPGA efficiency, including 72.3% test accuracy on CIFAR-10 achieved with fewer than 0.3M logic gates, while attaining sub-20 ns single-sample inference using only LUT resources.