JTok: On Token Embedding as another Axis of Scaling Law via Joint Token Self-modulation

LLMs have traditionally scaled along dense dimensions, where performance is coupled with near-linear increases in computational cost. While MoE decouples capacity from compute, it introduces large memory overhead and hardware efficiency challenges. To overcome these, we propose token-indexed parameters as a novel, orthogonal scaling axis that decouple model capacity from FLOPs. Specifically, we introduce Joint-Token (JTok) and Mixture of Joint-Token (JTok-M), which augment Transformer layers with modulation vectors retrieved from auxiliary embedding tables. These vectors modulate the backbone via lightweight, element-wise operations, incurring negligible FLOPs overhead. Extensive experiments on both dense and MoE backbones, spanning from 650M (190M + 460M embedding) to 61B (17B + 44B embedding) total parameters, demonstrate that our approach consistently reduces validation loss and significantly improves downstream task performance (e.g., +4.1 on MMLU, +8.3 on ARC, +8.9 on CEval). Rigorous isoFLOPs analysis further confirms that JTok-M fundamentally shifts the quality-compute Pareto frontier, achieving comparable model quality with 35% less compute relative to vanilla MoE architectures, and we validate that token-indexed parameters exhibit a predictable power-law scaling behavior. Moreover, our efficient implementation ensures that the overhead introduced by JTok and JTok-M remains marginal.

Agile Retrospectives: What went well? What didn't go well? What should we do?

In Agile/Scrum software development, the idea of retrospective meetings (retros) is one of the core elements of the project process. In this paper, we present our work in progress focusing on two aspects: analysis of potential usage of generative AI for information interaction within retrospective meetings, and visualisation of retros' information to software development teams. We also present our prototype tool RetroAI++, focusing on retros-related functionalities.

Boosting Order-Preserving and Transferability for Neural Architecture Search: a Joint Architecture Refined Search and Fine-tuning Approach

Supernet is a core component in many recent Neural Architecture Search (NAS) methods. It not only helps embody the search space but also provides a (relative) estimation of the final performance of candidate architectures. Thus, it is critical that the top architectures ranked by a supernet should be consistent with those ranked by true performance, which is known as the order-preserving ability. In this work, we analyze the order-preserving ability on the whole search space (global) and a sub-space of top architectures (local), and empirically show that the local order-preserving for current two-stage NAS methods still need to be improved. To rectify this, we propose a novel concept of Supernet Shifting, a refined search strategy combining architecture searching with supernet fine-tuning. Specifically, apart from evaluating, the training loss is also accumulated in searching and the supernet is updated every iteration. Since superior architectures are sampled more frequently in evolutionary searching, the supernet is encouraged to focus on top architectures, thus improving local order-preserving. Besides, a pre-trained supernet is often un-reusable for one-shot methods. We show that Supernet Shifting can fulfill transferring supernet to a new dataset. Specifically, the last classifier layer will be unset and trained through evolutionary searching. Comprehensive experiments show that our method has better order-preserving ability and can find a dominating architecture. Moreover, the pre-trained supernet can be easily transferred into a new dataset with no loss of performance.