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Torsten Hoefler

26 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Outliers: A Study of Optimizers Under Quantization

ICLR 2026poster

As new optimizers gain traction and model quantization becomes standard for efficient deployment, a key question arises: how does the choice of optimizer affect model performance in the presence of quantization? Despite progress in both areas, systematic evidence on optimizer–quantization interactio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Bridging the Gap Between Promise and Performance for FP4 Quantization

ICLR 2026poster

The recent hardware-accelerated microscaling 4-bit floating-point formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4, supported on NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, promise to revolutionize large language model (LLM) inference. Yet, their practical benefits remain unproven. We present the first comprehensive study of MXFP4 and NV…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Memory-Efficient LLMs Training with Dynamic Sparsity: From Stability to Practical Scaling

ICML 2026poster

Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) offers a promising paradigm for improving the training and inference efficiency of deep neural networks; however, we find that in large language model training, DST suffers from optimization instability, manifested as loss spikes following topology updates. In this work…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Process Reward Agents for Steering Knowledge-Intensive Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains remains challenging because intermediate steps are often not locally verifiable: unlike math or code, evaluating step correctness may require synthesizing clues across large external knowledge sources. As a result, subtle errors can propagate through reasonin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The Geometry of LLM Quantization: GPTQ as Babai's Nearest Plane Algorithm

ICLR 2026poster

Quantizing the weights of large language models (LLMs) from 16-bit to lower bitwidth is the de facto approach to deploy massive transformers onto more affordable accelerators. While GPTQ emerged as one of the standard methods for one-shot post-training quantization at LLM scale, its inner workings a…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

WUSH: Near-Optimal Adaptive Transforms for LLM Quantization

ICML 2026poster

Quantizing LLM weights and activations is a standard approach for efficient deployment, but a few extreme outliers can stretch the dynamic range and amplify low-bit quantization error. Prior transform-based mitigations (e.g., Hadamard rotations) are fixed and data-agnostic, and their optimality for …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

When Data Is Scarce: Scaling Sparse Language Models with Repeated Training

ICML 2026poster

Scaling laws for dense LLMs under infinite data are well explored, but how sparsity interacts with limited data is not. In this work, we study sparse training in data-constrained regimes where limited unique tokens require multi-epoch training. Our experiments span models up to 3.84B parameters, spa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

All models are wrong, some are useful: Model Selection with Limited Labels

AISTATS 2025poster

We introduce MODEL SELECTOR, a framework for label-efficient selection of pretrained classifiers. Given a pool of unlabeled target data, MODEL SELECTOR samples a small subset of highly informative examples for labeling, in order to efficiently identify the best pretrained model for deployment on thi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

HALO: Hadamard-Assisted Lower-Precision Optimization for LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Quantized training of Large Language Models (LLMs) remains an open challenge, as maintaining accuracy while performing all matrix multiplications in low precision has proven difficult. This is particularly the case when fine-tuning pre-trained models, which can have large weight, activation, and err…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

DiffDA: a Diffusion model for weather-scale Data Assimilation

ICML 2024poster

The generation of initial conditions via accurate data assimilation is crucial for weather forecasting and climate modeling. We propose DiffDA as a denoising diffusion model capable of assimilating atmospheric variables using predicted states and sparse observations. Acknowledging the similarity bet…

2024

Graph of Thoughts: Solving Elaborate Problems with Large Language Models

AAAI 2024technical

We introduce Graph of Thoughts (GoT): a framework that advances prompting capabilities in large language models (LLMs) beyond those offered by paradigms such as Chain-of-Thought or Tree of Thoughts (ToT). The key idea and primary advantage of GoT is the ability to model the information generated…

2024

QUIK: Towards End-to-end 4-Bit Inference on Generative Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) from the GPT family have become extremely popular, leading to a race towards reducing their inference costs to allow for efficient local computation. However, the vast majority of existing work focuses on weight-only quantization, which can reduce runtime costs in the me…

2024

QuaRot: Outlier-Free 4-Bit Inference in Rotated LLMs

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce QuaRot, a new Quantization scheme based on Rotations, which is able to quantize LLMs end-to-end, including all weights, activations, and KV cache in 4 bits. QuaRot rotates LLMs in a way that removes outliers from the hidden state without changing the output, making quantization easier.…

2024

SliceGPT: Compress Large Language Models by Deleting Rows and Columns

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models have become the cornerstone of natural language processing, but their use comes with substantial costs in terms of compute and memory resources. Sparsification provides a solution to alleviate these resource constraints, and recent works have shown that trained models can be sp…

2024

SpQR: A Sparse-Quantized Representation for Near-Lossless LLM Weight Compression

ICLR 2024poster

Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining have led to high-quality LLMs with impressive abilities. By compressing such LLMs via quantization to 3-4 bits per parameter, they can fit into memory-limited devices such as laptops and mobile phones, enabling personalized use. Quantizing mo…

2023

Compressing multidimensional weather and climate data into neural networks

ICLR 2023top-5%

Weather and climate simulations produce petabytes of high-resolution data that are later analyzed by researchers in order to understand climate change or severe weather. We propose a new method of compressing this multidimensional weather and climate data: a coordinate-based neural network is traine…

2023

Differentiable Transportation Pruning

ICCV 2023poster

Deep learning algorithms are increasingly employed at the edge. However, edge devices are resource constrained and thus require efficient deployment of deep neural networks. Pruning methods are a key tool for edge deployment as they can improve storage, compute, memory bandwidth, and energy usage. I…

Cited by 16PDFScholar
2023

OPTQ: Accurate Quantization for Generative Pre-trained Transformers

ICLR 2023poster

Generative Pre-trained Transformer models, known as GPT or OPT, set themselves apart through breakthrough performance across complex language modelling tasks, but also by their extremely high computational and storage costs. Specifically, due to their massive size, even inference for large, highly-a…

2022

ENS-10: A Dataset For Post-Processing Ensemble Weather Forecasts

NeurIPS 2022accept

Post-processing ensemble prediction systems can improve the reliability of weather forecasting, especially for extreme event prediction. In recent years, different machine learning models have been developed to improve the quality of weather post-processing. However, these models require a comprehen…

2022

Neural Parameter Allocation Search

ICLR 2022poster

Training neural networks requires increasing amounts of memory. Parameter sharing can reduce memory and communication costs, but existing methods assume networks have many identical layers and utilize hand-crafted sharing strategies that fail to generalize. We introduce Neural Parameter Allocation S…

2021

ProGraML: A Graph-based Program Representation for Data Flow Analysis and Compiler Optimizations

ICML 2021spotlight

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly seen as a viable approach for building compiler optimization heuristics, but many ML methods cannot replicate even the simplest of the data flow analyses that are critical to making good optimization decisions. We posit that if ML cannot do that, then it is insu…

2020

Augment Your Batch: Improving Generalization Through Instance Repetition

CVPR 2020poster

Large-batch SGD is important for scaling training of deep neural networks. However, without fine-tuning hyperparameter schedules, the generalization of the model may be hampered. We propose to use batch augmentation: replicating instances of samples within the same batch with different data augmenta…

Cited by 271PDFcodeScholar
2018

Neural Code Comprehension: A Learnable Representation of Code Semantics

NeurIPS 2018poster

With the recent success of embeddings in natural language processing, research has been conducted into applying similar methods to code analysis. Most works attempt to process the code directly or use a syntactic tree representation, treating it like sentences written in a natural language. However,…

2018

The Convergence of Sparsified Gradient Methods

NeurIPS 2018poster

Distributed training of massive machine learning models, in particular deep neural networks, via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is becoming commonplace. Several families of communication-reduction methods, such as quantization, large-batch methods, and gradient sparsification, have been proposed.…

Cited by 640SourcePDFScholar