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b12202

The llama.cpp v1.220.2 release introduces enhanced BF16 precision support across multiple components, aligning with reference implementations by moving specific operations like GLM4 family projections, MiMoVL vision matmuls, and Qwen3-TTS speaker encoder conv1d to BF16 where appropriate. Backends such as CUDA, Hexagon, OpenCL, WebGPU, and Vulkan now uniformly handle GGML_PREC_BF16 similarly to F32, while CPU, SpaceMIT, and ET backends extend flash attention support to BF16 with F32 accumulation. Flash attention tests now include BF16 cases, and the KQ multiplication in Llama is updated to request BF16 precision. A TODO remains in clip.cpp for future work.

Show HN: Throng, a project first, terminal 2nd IDE for command line people

I've been beavering away at this since July, and its finally getting to a point where its stabilising.It started Windows only, but I recently converted over to Linux, so I've been ironing out the kinks in the last week. You can install it via apt or rpm, or .exe or .msi on Windows.Many more features to come, including native agent support and more preview features (images, PDF, document formats). Claude works pretty well in it, but I've not tried many other agents yet.I rarely leave throng now - 99% of my work happens inside it. I stopped using Visual Studio around 10 months ago (in favour of VSCode), and now I don't even use VSCode. Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50412226 Points: 1 # Comments: 0

b12180

The release adds the Kimi-K3.1-Pro text model to llama.cpp, replacing full-attention MLA layers in K3 with DSA (Dynamic Sparse Attention) layers featuring a lightning indexer. The indexer uses an additive mask over the cache and reuses sparse flash attention paths, while preserving existing KDA layers and MoE components. The model's architecture includes four indexer tensors per DSA layer, hybrid memory for caching, and maintains quantization integrity by excluding indexer parameters from quant overrides. Verified against HF checkpoint with identical PPL beyond context length, and supports multiple platforms including macOS, Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS.

Why a new report on Anthropic automating AI development is alarming researchers

Anthropic is using AI to build more powerful AI. And it appears to be working remarkably well, with the company's models improving roughly twice as quickly as a year ago, with little indication of slowing down. That's according to a new report published Thursday by the AI safety research organization METR, following an 11-week investigation […]

Zyphra ZYFA: FP8 FlashAttention for AMD MI355X, Up to 1.76x Faster

Zyphra released ZYFA, open-source FP8 and BF16 prefill attention kernels for AMD Instinct MI355X. On real model activations, its FP8 kernels run 1.16-1.76x faster than AMD’s AITER, with 62-78% lower error at head dimension 128. The post Zyphra ZYFA: FP8 FlashAttention for AMD MI355X, Up to 1.76x Faster appeared first on MarkTechPost.

b12142

A fix was implemented to verify the combined K+V f16 scratch size in the Flash Attention dequantization path for Vulkan, addressing issue #30048.

LowRAM: Low-Rank Keys and Amortised Values for Composable KV Cache Compression at Test-Time

arXiv:2611.07025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive decoding relies on the KV cache, whose memory footprint grows linearly with context length and caps batch size and throughput. Existing post-training methods exploit redundancy across tokens, layers, and feature dimensions, or lower numerical precision. We identify a complementary axis: within each attention head, values are largely predictable from their corresponding keys. We exploit this with value cache amortisation, which fits a lightweight per-head predictor at test time and stores residuals only for the tokens it reconstructs worst, giving $4\times$ near-lossless value compression. The predictor can be initialised by meta-learning for substantially reduced prefill overhead, or fitted from scratch in settings that allow a one-off cost, such as multi-query inference. We pair value amortisation with cross-layer low-rank key compression to produce LowRAM, an asymmetric compression pipeline that stays close to lossless across three model families. By reconstructing only a selected subset of KV pairs at each decoding step, LowRAM can keep decoding overhead minimal and achieve up to $5\times$ higher peak decode throughput at $4\times$ compression. LowRAM further composes with quantisation and eviction, reaching $26.9\times$ compression at $94.5\%$ of baseline performance on long contexts. These results show that treating keys and values as structurally distinct enables efficient, aggressive, and composable KV cache compression.

Migrating vLLM to the LibTorch Stable ABI

How vLLM migrated its CUDA build and compiled dependencies to the LibTorch Stable ABI, enabling compatible PyTorch upgrades without rebuilding vLLM.

New NVIDIA Cosmos 3 Open Models for Interactive World Simulation

NVIDIA has introduced four new open-weight checkpoints for its Cosmos 3 model family—Cosmos3-Nano-Transfer-Auto, Cosmos3-Nano-Sim-Auto, Cosmos3-Nano-Sim-Transfer, and Cosmos3-Nano-Sim-Bimanual—enabling interactive world simulation and multi-sensor, multi-view driving scene generation. Each model is a post-trained variant of Cosmos 3 Nano with 16B trainable parameters and is based on OpenMDW1.1, allowing commercial and non-commercial use. The checkpoints support applications in robotics and autonomous driving by generating synchronized camera and LiDAR data, enabling streaming simulations, translating simulator controls into photorealistic video, and predicting visual outcomes from robot actions. They are designed to be adapted using custom data and training recipes, with support for offline data generation, causal distillation, and interactive rollouts. Resources include technical reports, demos, and notebooks for inference and adaptation.

Not All Loops Cost the Same: Phase-Dependent Depth for Serving Looped Transformers

arXiv:2611.07211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped transformers scale inference-time reasoning by repeatedly reusing a shared core, increasing computation without increasing parameter count. Serving prefilling and decoding with a uniform loop budget couples their costs. We present LoopDuet, a phase-dependent depth and training-free serving approach that selects the two budgets jointly while preserving decoding depth at prefilling boundaries. Our vLLM implementation gathers tokens requiring further recurrence into compact batches, turning the selected allocation into executable savings with existing weights and attention kernels. At runtime, a queue-age controller adjusts prefilling depth to retain quality as demand changes. Experiments on the full HotpotQA dataset with one A100-80GB demonstrate two benefits of this flexibility. First, separate phase budgets improve the quality--throughput trade-off: Huginn delivers 19\% more throughput than the fastest tested uniform setting meeting the same accuracy criterion, while a higher-throughput operating point gains 6.04 EM points over uniform depth eight at 97\% of its throughput. Second, the same execution mechanism retains more quality under load: on two evaluated OLMo arrival traces, adaptive prefilling gains 0.92--1.35 EM points over the most accurate tested fixed-depth controls at the same 100\% attainment of a one-second time-to-first-token target. Together, these results establish LoopDuet as a practical way to turn flexible model computation into higher serving capacity and better quality under load.

NUMA-Torch: Compiler-Driven NUMA-Aware LLM Prefill on Multi-Socket CPUs

arXiv:2611.07105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For sufficiently large transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs), whose parameters cannot be retained in on-chip caches, prefill throughput on multi-socket CPUs is often limited by sustainable DRAM bandwidth rather than peak floating-point throughput. In the standard PyTorch compilation (i.e., TorchInductor) path, model weights are allocated without considering the Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) topology: specifically, the affinity between memory banks and compute cores is disregarded. This causes a substantial fraction of weight accesses to traverse the inter-socket interconnect, severely degrading the effective memory bandwidth available to each socket. We address this bottleneck through a compiler-level solution that makes TorchInductor NUMA-aware. Treating each NUMA socket as an independent tensor-parallel partition, we introduce NUMA-aware Tensor Parallelism (NUMA-TP). This approach transparently shards weights across sockets and schedules compute kernels such that thread pools and memory allocations remain strictly local to their respective sockets using CPU affinity. We evaluate the approach on GPT-2 (117M, 345M, 762M) and BERT (Small, Large), which exercise standard multi-head attention and MLP, as well as Gemma 3 270M, which combines Multi-Query Attention with a GeGLU-gated MLP. By strictly enforcing data locality, our approach successfully mitigates cross-socket traffic, achieving prefill speedups of up to 2.63x on a dual-socket Haswell platform, up to 1.87x on a dual-socket Cascade Lake platform, and up to 2.27x on a four-socket Haswell-EX platform.

WeLM-Image: A Unified Image Generation Model towards Visual Intelligence

arXiv:2611.07392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present \textbf{WeLM-Image}, a unified image foundation model that integrates multimodal understanding into text-to-image generation, instruction-guided editing, and multi-reference synthesis. Designed for single-GPU deployment in WeChat's large-scale consumer applications, the model processes text, reference images, and target latents as one interleaved sequence. A Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) backbone combines shared attention with independent understanding and generation parameters to limit optimization interference. Equipping each path with Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) modules provides sparse capacity, with 31.7B stored parameters and approximately 5.4B generation parameters activated per target latent token. A generation-oriented data engine combines a knowledge-grounded visual vocabulary with large-scale visual clustering to balance semantic coverage and editing tasks, while training-time evaluation guides iterative data refinement. Bilingual annotations and verified editing supervision support progressive training up to native 1.5K resolution. We optimize generation and editing separately with rubric- and checklist-based rewards, then consolidate the specialized policies through noise-aware on-policy distillation. In the reported overall comparisons, the 1536-resolution model ranks first among the evaluated open-source models on PRISM-Bench, Qwen-Image-Bench, and UnicBench. MeanFlow-based few-step distillation yields WeLM-Image-Turbo, which generates a $1024\times1024$ image in 4.98\,s on a single NVIDIA H20 GPU using eight guidance-free steps.

When Every Choice Is Correct: A Causal Study of Numerical Preference in Language Models

arXiv:2611.06025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model chooses a number between 1 and 30, every integer in the range is valid, yet the model can favor particular answers. We use numerical choice to study how preference is processed across layers and tokens. Perturbation probing and gradient attribution nominate neurons for activation interventions. In a selected Qwen3-4B case, a pre-answer edit changes 17 to 15 while both runs first emit 1. After the edit ends, selective cache and attention-output replacements trace part of its continuing influence on the second digit. Replacing one attention head's output or the other heads' outputs jointly produces similar immediate readout contributions; both interventions restore 17 but have different final log-odds effects on 7 versus 5. Holding later multilayer perceptron (MLP) outputs at their values from the edited run without either replacement reduces this effect gap from 0.119 to 0.0025 nat. Later computation therefore changes how similar local contributions affect the continuation. Retrospective estimates across eighteen contexts capture much of the probability movement but miss the selected answer switch. Prompt tests also separate influence from answer changes: one held-out prompt retains influence without switching, and only one of twelve fresh wordings qualifies for the reader/MLP test; there, joint MLP clamping again reduces the gap between the two reader effects while the answer remains 17. These results use numerical choice as a controlled case for studying persistent state and conditional downstream processing; they do not establish the origin or a complete circuit of natural numerical preference.

Where Should a KV-Cache Repair Budget Go? Distractor Structure and Contextual Compatibility in Non-Prefix Reuse

arXiv:2611.06397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-prefix KV-cache reuse encodes retrieved chunks independently and concatenates their caches. To find where a small repair budget should be spent, we vary the chunks around the answer-bearing one (the target) across three 7B-8B models and four datasets of dialogue memory, open-domain QA and API documentation. Reuse loses 19-100% of the context-dependent questions that full prefill answers, and it loses more when the other chunks are of the same kind as the target. Because the recoverable damage is spread over these other chunks, restoring a few of them recovers little, and the budget is better spent on the target. This works through contextual compatibility: recomputing the target against the reused cache beats inserting its full-prefill KV in all seven settings tested, although the recomputed KV stays far from the full-prefill KV. Question attention over reused caches, however, selects the target in at most 18.8% of development questions. A retriever finds it more often, and recomputing its top chunk after moving it next to the question significantly beats InfoFlow-style reordering at the same 5% budget in six of nine open-domain QA and API-documentation settings. On dialogue memory, though, recomputing chunks never significantly beats the token-level selector chosen for each setting.

Ab Initio Accuracy Beyond the Cutoff: Distributed Message-Passing Equivariant Attention at Tens-of-Millions-of-Atom Scale

arXiv:2611.06122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular dynamics predicts molecular motion from atomic forces and trajectory integration. Density functional theory (DFT) provides first-principles forces, but its $O(N^3)$ cost limits simulations to thousands of atoms; empirical force fields scale to millions but miss bond breaking and charge transfer. Equivariant message-passing Transformers learn the ab initio potential at linear cost. Stacked layers propagate information beyond a single cutoff, giving four layers a receptive field up to 23{\AA}. At this frontier, scale is limited by communication: layers exchange boundary features across devices, force backpropagation repeats the exchange, and moving atoms change neighbor graphs and tensor shapes. We present Tessera, a distributed runtime that fixes workload shapes between rebuilds. It sorts atoms along a space-filling curve into equal-count shards, ensuring identical atom counts and tensor shapes per rank. Peer sets scale as $K^{0.5}$, not $K$. A conservative neighbor skin preserves topology across updates, enabling each rebuild interval to replay as one CUDA Graph. Fused kernels, three-level neighbor search, and overlapped All-to-All complete it. On 512 GPUs, Tessera sustains 30.7M atoms at 89.7% weak-scaling efficiency (77--90% across three per-GPU loads); per-step time rises 1.11--1.29x as machine and problem grow 16x. Graph reuse cuts full-step time $1.87\times$. Across an $8\times$ device increase, neighbor-search cost grows $1.7\times$, versus $3.0\times$ for Morton order. In a live $10.24$M-atom salt solution, NVE energy drift is $0.42\,\mu$eV/atom/ps over $10$ ps, and structure matches a serial reference. A 10.06M-atom Norovirus capsid sustains 100 ps of NVT at $\approx 8$ ps/day on 256 A100 GPUs. Over 200,000 steps, it has no broken bonds or anomalously close pairs and uses three compiled variants, with no graph breaks or eager fallbacks.

b12118

The update enhances OpenCL performance for decode operations by optimizing workgroup usage for q4_K gate up and GLU, and adds support for Flash Attention (FA) in various configurations including GQA 2, 6, and 16 with different head sizes, improving efficiency on specific hardware setups.