Richard
Abstract:Diffusion and flow-based models have become the de facto approaches for generating continuous data, e.g., in domains such as images and videos. Their success has attracted growing interest in applying them to language modeling. Unlike their image-domain counterparts, today's leading diffusion language models (DLMs) primarily operate over discrete tokens. In this paper, we show that continuous DLMs can be made effective with minimal adaptation to the discrete domain. We propose Embedded Language Flows (ELF), a class of diffusion models in continuous embedding space based on continuous-time Flow Matching. Unlike existing DLMs, ELF predominantly stays within the continuous embedding space until the final time step, where it maps to discrete tokens using a shared-weight network. This formulation makes it straightforward to adapt established techniques from image-domain diffusion models, e.g., classifier-free guidance (CFG). Experiments show that ELF substantially outperforms leading discrete and continuous DLMs, achieving better generation quality with fewer sampling steps. These results suggest that ELF offers a promising path toward effective continuous DLMs.
Abstract:Grammaticality and likelihood are distinct notions in human language. Pretrained language models (LMs), which are probabilistic models of language fitted to maximize corpus likelihood, generate grammatically well-formed text and discriminate well between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in tightly controlled minimal pairs. However, their string probabilities do not sharply discriminate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences overall. But do LMs implicitly acquire a grammaticality distinction distinct from string probability? We explore this question through studying internal representations of LMs, by training a linear probe on a dataset of grammatical and (synthetic) ungrammatical sentences obtained by applying perturbations to a naturalistic text corpus. We find that this simple grammaticality probe generalizes to human-curated grammaticality judgment benchmarks and outperforms LM probability-based grammaticality judgments. When applied to semantic plausibility benchmarks, in which both members of a minimal pair are grammatical and differ in only plausibility, the probe however performs worse than string probability. The English-trained probe also exhibits nontrivial cross-lingual generalization, outperforming string probabilities on grammaticality benchmarks in numerous other languages. Additionally, probe scores correlate only weakly with string probabilities. These results collectively suggest that LMs acquire to some extent an implicit grammaticality distinction within their hidden layers.
Abstract:LLM architecture research generally aims to maximize model quality subject to fixed compute/latency budgets. However, many applications of interest such as edge and on-device deployment are further constrained by the model's memory footprint, thus motivating parameter-efficient architectures for language modeling. This paper describes a simple architecture that improves the parameter-efficiency of LLMs. Our architecture makes use of looped Transformers as a core primitive, which reuse Transformer layers across depth and are thus more parameter-efficient than ordinary (depth-matched) Transformers. We organize the looped Transformer into three blocks--begin, middle, and end blocks--where each block itself consists of multiple Transformer layers, and only the middle block is applied recurrently across depth. We augment the looped middle block with hyper-connections (Xie et al., 2026), which expand the residual stream into matrix-valued residual streams. Hyper-connections are applied only after each loop, and therefore add minimal new parameters and compute cost. Across various model scales, we find that our Hyper-Connected Looped Transformer (Hyperloop Transformer) is able to outperform depth-matched Transformer and mHC Transformer baselines despite using approximately 50% fewer parameters. The outperformance persists through post-training weight quantization, thus positioning Hyperloop Transformers as an attractive architecture for memory-efficient language modeling.
Abstract:Modern language models demonstrate impressive coding capabilities in common programming languages (PLs), such as C++ and Python, but their performance in lower-resource PLs is often limited by training data availability. In principle, however, most programming skills are universal across PLs, so the capability acquired in one PL should transfer to others. In this work, we propose the task of zero-shot cross-programming-language transfer for code RL. We find that, for Llama-3.1, RL training for code generation in a source PL fails to improve, and sometimes even degrades, the performance on other target PLs. To address this, we hypothesize that effective RL transfer requires a generalizable SFT initialization before RL. We thus propose **Parallel-SFT**, an SFT strategy that incorporates "parallel programs" -- functionally equivalent code implemented in multiple PLs -- into the data mixture. We demonstrate that this improves transferability: when we subsequently perform RL on our Parallel-SFT model, we observe better generalization to unseen PLs. Analysis of the model internal representations reveals that Parallel-SFT leads to a more functionality-centric latent space, where equivalent programs across PLs are more tightly clustered, which we hypothesize to contribute to the improved transferability.
Abstract:Given a question, a language model (LM) implicitly encodes a distribution over possible answers. In practice, post-training procedures for LMs often collapse this distribution onto a single dominant mode. While this is generally not a problem for benchmark-style evaluations that assume one correct answer, many real-world tasks inherently involve multiple valid answers or irreducible uncertainty. Examples include medical diagnosis, ambiguous question answering, and settings with incomplete information. In these cases, we would like LMs to generate multiple plausible hypotheses, ideally with confidence estimates for each one, and without computationally intensive repeated sampling to generate non-modal answers. This paper describes a multi-answer reinforcement learning approach for training LMs to perform distributional reasoning over multiple answers during inference. We modify the RL objective to enable models to explicitly generate multiple candidate answers in a single forward pass, internalizing aspects of inference-time search into the model's generative process. Across question-answering, medical diagnostic, and coding benchmarks, we observe improved diversity, coverage, and set-level calibration scores compared to single answer trained baselines. Models trained with our approach require fewer tokens to generate multiple answers than competing approaches. On coding tasks, they are also substantially more accurate. These results position multi-answer RL as a principled and compute-efficient alternative to inference-time scaling procedures such as best-of-k. Code and more information can be found at https://multi-answer-rl.github.io/.
Abstract:Learning time series foundation models has been shown to be a promising approach for zero-shot time series forecasting across diverse time series domains. Insofar as scaling has been a critical driver of performance of foundation models in other modalities such as language and vision, much recent work on time series foundation modeling has focused on scaling. This has resulted in time series foundation models with hundreds of millions of parameters that are, while performant, inefficient and expensive to use in practice. This paper describes a simple recipe for learning efficient foundation models for zero-shot time series forecasting that are orders of magnitude smaller. We show that large-scale transformers are not necessary: small hybrid models that interleave long convolution and linear RNN layers (in particular DeltaNet layers) can match the performance of larger transformer-based models while being more than a hundred times smaller. We also describe several data augmentation and inference strategies that further improve performance. This recipe results in Reverso, a family of efficient time series foundation models for zero-shot forecasting that significantly push the performance-efficiency Pareto frontier.
Abstract:Scaling language models to long contexts is often bottlenecked by the size of the key-value (KV) cache. In deployed settings, long contexts are typically managed through compaction in token space via summarization. However, summarization can be highly lossy, substantially harming downstream performance. Recent work on Cartridges has shown that it is possible to train highly compact KV caches in latent space that closely match full-context performance, but at the cost of slow and expensive end-to-end optimization. This work describes an approach for fast context compaction in latent space through Attention Matching, which constructs compact keys and values to reproduce attention outputs and preserve attention mass at a per-KV-head level. We show that this formulation naturally decomposes into simple subproblems, some of which admit efficient closed-form solutions. Within this framework, we develop a family of methods that significantly push the Pareto frontier of compaction time versus quality, achieving up to 50x compaction in seconds on some datasets with little quality loss.
Abstract:Asset retrieval--finding similar assets in a financial universe--is central to quantitative investment decision-making. Existing approaches define similarity through historical price patterns or sector classifications, but such backward-looking criteria provide no guarantee about future behavior. We argue that effective asset retrieval should be future-aligned: the retrieved assets should be those most likely to exhibit correlated future returns. To this end, we propose Future-Aligned Soft Contrastive Learning (FASCL), a representation learning framework whose soft contrastive loss uses pairwise future return correlations as continuous supervision targets. We further introduce an evaluation protocol designed to directly assess whether retrieved assets share similar future trajectories. Experiments on 4,229 US equities demonstrate that FASCL consistently outperforms 13 baselines across all future-behavior metrics. The source code will be available soon.
Abstract:This paper introduces a novel cross-physiology translation task: synthesizing sleep electroencephalography (EEG) from respiration signals. To address the significant complexity gap between the two modalities, we propose a waveform-conditional generative framework that preserves fine-grained respiratory dynamics while constraining the EEG target space through discrete tokenization. Trained on over 28,000 individuals, our model achieves a 7% Mean Absolute Error in EEG spectrogram reconstruction. Beyond reconstruction, the synthesized EEG supports downstream tasks with performance comparable to ground truth EEG on age estimation (MAE 5.0 vs. 5.1 years), sex detection (AUROC 0.81 vs. 0.82), and sleep staging (Accuracy 0.84 vs. 0.88), significantly outperforming baselines trained directly on breathing. Finally, we demonstrate that the framework generalizes to contactless sensing by synthesizing EEG from wireless radio-frequency reflections, highlighting the feasibility of remote, non-contact neurological assessment during sleep.
Abstract:Distilling pretrained softmax attention Transformers into more efficient hybrid architectures that interleave softmax and linear attention layers is a promising approach for improving the inference efficiency of LLMs without requiring expensive pretraining from scratch. A critical factor in the conversion process is layer selection, i.e., deciding on which layers to convert to linear attention variants. This paper describes a simple and efficient recipe for layer selection that uses layer importance scores derived from a small amount of training on generic text data. Once the layers have been selected we use a recent pipeline for the distillation process itself \citep[RADLADS;][]{goldstein2025radlads}, which consists of attention weight transfer, hidden state alignment, KL-based distribution matching, followed by a small amount of finetuning. We find that this approach is more effective than existing approaches for layer selection, including heuristics that uniformly interleave linear attentions based on a fixed ratio, as well as more involved approaches that rely on specialized diagnostic datasets.