Eugene Belilovsky

pietro.cagnasso@mila.quebec

Xiao Huang

Master's Research - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

xiaolong.huang@mila.quebec

Paul Janson

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

paul.janson@mila.quebec

Gwen Legate

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

gwendolyne.legate@mila.quebec

Paria Mehrbod

Master's Research - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

paria.mehrbod@mila.quebec

Abhinav Moudgil

PhD - Concordia University

abhinav.moudgil@mila.quebec

Adel Nabli

PhD - Concordia University

adel.nabli@mila.quebec

Geraldin Nanfack

Postdoctorate - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

geraldin.nanfack@mila.quebec

Albert Orozco Camacho

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

vaibhav.singh@mila.quebec

Benjamin Therien

PhD - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

benjamin.therien@mila.quebec

Research Intern - Concordia University

junior-cedric.tonga@mila.quebec

Zhang Yanlei

Collaborating Alumni - Université de Montréal

Principal supervisor :

yanlei.zhang@mila.quebec

amirhossein.zamani@mila.quebec

Amirhossein Zamani

PhD - Concordia University

Co-supervisor :

Blake Richards

Publications

Efficient Long-Horizon Learning for Learned Optimization

Xiaolong Huang

Benjamin Therien

James Harrison

Learned optimization aims to improve upon hand-designed optimizers (e.g., Adam and Muon) by meta-learning small neural network optimizers ov… (see more)er a distribution of tasks. While recent work has greatly advanced the architectural design and inductive biases of learned optimizers (LOs), current meta-training approaches still suffer from two main difficulties: (1) they cannot efficiently scale meta-training to long-horizon inner problems and (2) they often fail to compete with strong hand-designed optimizers. To address these limitations, we propose Efficient Long-hOrizon (ELO) learning, an efficient meta-training algorithm that (1) reallocates redundant meta-training compute to longer failure regimes, achieving efficient long-horizon learning, and (2) enforces decoupled progressive expert supervision, providing stable meta-learning signals that additionally improve the generalization of LOs. Our empirical study evaluates ELO for meta-training both element-wise and matrix-based LOs. Across downstream language modeling (GPT-2-124M/350M on FineWeb) and image classification (ViT-B/16, ResNet-50 on ImageNet-1K) tasks, ELO substantially improves the long-unroll performance and out-of-distribution generalization of the base LOs. In particular, ELO-Celo2 consistently outperforms well-tuned AdamW across all evaluated tasks, while remaining competitive with Muon on language modeling. \textit{Notably, all ELO baselines require less than 7 H100 GPU-hours for meta-training.}

2026-07-06

arXiv (preprint)

Can Model Merging Improve Aggregation in DiLoCo?

Model merging techniques, which aggregate independently finetuned models into one to combine their capabilities, have become a topic of sign… (see more)ificant interest in recent years, with a broad array of methods having been proposed to tackle this problem. Simultaneously, an emerging trend in distributed learning has been the use of methods such as local SGD and DiLoCo, which greatly reduce communication costs by periodically aggregating the independently trained local models. However, these communication-efficient methods have been shown to degrade in performance relative to the FLOP-matched data-parallel gold standard as the number of independent local models grows and as the number of local training steps before global communication is increased. In this work, we draw an explicit analogy between the pseudo-gradient aggregation step in local SGD/DiLoCo and task arithmetic-based model merging, establishing a straightforward way to utilize merging methods in the context of distributed optimization. We then evaluate multiple state-of-the-art model merging methods in this setting and identify one method in particular, Iso-C, as a promising approach for improving DiLoCo. We find that DiLoCo SGD with Iso-C aggregation outperforms not only simple pseudo-gradient averaging but even the momentum-based DiLoCo, despite lacking a momentum mechanism itself. Building on this finding, we propose IsoLoCo, which adapts Iso-C for distributed training by equipping it with Nesterov momentum. Our empirical evaluations on language model pre-training across varying numbers of local workers show that IsoLoCo significantly outperforms DiLoCo, with the gap between them widening as the number of workers increases. This advantage remains present across model sizes and inner step counts, confirming that merging-inspired aggregation is an effective strategy for low-communication distributed training.

2026-07-02

arXiv (preprint)

Stabilizing Black-Box Prompt Optimization with Textual Regularization and Signal Aggregation

MohammadReza Davari

Utkarsh Garg

Weixin Cai

An increasing number of NLP applications interact with large language models (LLMs) through black-box APIs, making prompt engineering critic… (see more)al for controlling model behavior. Recent Automatic Prompt Optimization (APO) methods iteratively refine prompts using model-generated critiques (often called as textual gradients), but they predominantly optimize from failures and underutilize information contained in correct predictions, leading to instability and semantic drift. We propose TRAS (Textual Regularization with Aggregated Signals), a feedback-centric framework that is plug-and-play with existing APO search backbones. It retains the standard textual gradient signal from prior work for error correction, and introduces a complementary textual regularizer derived from successful predictions to preserve beneficial prompt components. Because both signals are stochastic and can be noisy, we further introduce Monte Carlo Signal Aggregation (MCSA), which samples multiple gradients or regularizers and aggregates them into a single actionable directive, emphasizing consistent, actionable advice while filtering out outliers. Motivated by rapid model churn, we also formalize Automatic Prompt Migration (APM), the practical problem of adapting an expert prompt across model versions or API providers without losing critical instructions. Across standard APO and APM scenarios, our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines, yielding higher accuracy, faster convergence, and lower query cost, while substantially reducing the degradation observed under naive prompt migration.

2026-06-28

Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Unifying Local Communications and Local Updates for LLM Pretraining

Pietro Cagnasso

Edouard Oyallon

Communication-efficient pre-training of LLMs is increasingly important as training draws on compute distributed across clusters, data center… (see more)s, and lower-bandwidth links. Many practical methods reduce communication frequency but still rely on synchronous All-Reduce operations that maintain identical model states and tie progress to global collectives. This can become a bottleneck when bandwidth or worker speed is heterogeneous. We introduce GASLoC, a novel decentralized pre-training algorithm that generalizes the notion of communication acceleration to the recently popular"outer optimizer"to allow a practical gossip-based training framework that is compatible with adaptive optimizers, allows for local optimizer steps, and can utilize sparse randomized peer communication. Empirically, on a number of standard LLM training tasks, we demonstrate that GASLoC outperforms state-of-the-art decentralized algorithms in single step per communication setting for a number of topologies and, unlike existing decentralized methods in the LLM setting, it allows to obtain performance competitive with DiLoCo when utilizing multiple local steps. In the heterogeneous bandwidth setting we demonstrate the advantage of GASLoC showing that it can significantly outperform DiLoCo.

2026-06-08

arXiv (preprint)

Learned Subspace Compression for Communication-Efficient Pipeline Parallelism

Paul Janson

Edouard Oyallon

Pipeline parallelism enables training of large language models that exceed single-device memory, yet inter-stage activation communication be… (see more)comes the dominant bottleneck when trained on low-bandwidth networks. Recent work in this area has proposed using fixed orthogonal projections to compress activations. However, this still results in a significant performance degradation and requires a number of non-standard adaptations to constrain the optimization. A natural alternative is to learn a low rank projection for each pipeline stage, however maintaining the necessary orthogonality of these projectors during training remains a challenge. We present Manifold Aware Projection Learning (MAPL), a method that treats inter-stage compression as a learnable orthogonal projection under explicit Stiefel manifold (orthogonal matrices) constraints. Rather than prescribing a fixed global subspace, MAPL lets each pipeline stage discover and continuously adapt its own task-optimal compression subspace via manifold-constrained steepest descent. To recover token-specific signals at stage boundaries, we introduce per-stage factorized anchor embeddings that allow for full-rank activation reconstruction with negligible communication overhead. We further show that we can incorporate residual vector quantization after projection with a streaming codebook synchronization protocol that amortizes dictionary communication. Across LLaMA models from 150M to 1B parameters we show that MAPL can be easily applied to the existing pipeline and can achieve high compression with neglibile performance degradation with a drastically improved tradeoffs in performance vs. compression compared to Subspace Networks.

2026-06-02

arXiv (preprint)

Path-independent Flow Matching for Multi-parameter Generative Dynamics

Sina Sanjari

Yanlei Zhang

Flow Matching is a powerful framework for learning transport maps between probability distributions. Yet its standard single-parameter formu… (see more)lation is not designed to capture multi-parameter variations where the resulting transport should be path-independent. Path independence is crucial because it ensures that transformations depend only on the initial and target distributions, not on the specific path. In this work, we introduce Path-independent Flow Matching (PiFM), a method for learning vector fields whose induced flows yield path-independent transport between distributions. We show that PiFM generalizes Flow Matching to higher-dimensional parameter domains while enforcing structural conditions that ensure consistency of composed transformations. In addition, we show that, under suitable assumptions, PiFM approximates the Wasserstein barycenter, linking the framework to a notion of distributional interpolation. To enable practical training, we propose a tractable, simulation-free objective that regresses onto multi-parameter conditional probability paths. We showcase empirically that PiFM outperforms other approaches on both synthetic and real world data in interpolating path-independent trajectories and generating desired out of distribution samples.

2026-05-29

SPIGM @ International Conference on Machine Learning (poster)

Meta-Merging by Checkpoint Nowcasting

Albert Manuel Orozco Camacho

Boris Knyazev

Model merging---the direct combination of parameters from independently fine-tuned networks---offers a way to compose task-specific capabili… (see more)ties without retraining or ensemble inference. Existing merge methods are often built from hand-crafted arithmetic or sparsification heuristics, leaving open whether general learned weight-space operators can be repurposed for merging directly. We study this question with NiNo, a pre-trained checkpoint-nowcasting meta-network originally designed to predict near-future training states from short checkpoint histories. We show that pre-trained NiNo can be reused as a data-free pairwise meta-merge operator for independently fine-tuned models. On an 8-task CLIP ViT-B/16 benchmark, NiNo is competitive with strong arithmetic baselines and consistently lands in the same functional region as weight averaging, Task Arithmetic, and TIES. Moreover, NiNo is best on HumanEval in a Qwen3 language extension among the compared merge methods, while extending meta-merge beyond pairs remains an open challenge. These results position learned checkpoint nowcasting as a practical starting point for data-free model merging and motivate future weight-space learners trained for merging explicitly.

2026-05-23

WSS @ International Conference on Machine Learning (poster)

Warming Up for Zeroth-Order Federated Pre-Training with Low Resource Clients

Gwen Legate

Federated learning enables collaborative model training across numerous edge devices without requiring participants to share data; however, … (see more)memory and communication constraints on these edge devices may preclude their participation in training. We consider a setting in which a subset of edge devices are below a critical memory or communication threshold required to conduct model updates. Under typical federated optimization algorithms, these devices are excluded from training which renders their data inaccessible and increases system induced bias. We are inspired by MeZO, a zeroth-order method used for memory-efficient fine-tuning. The increased variance inherent to zeroth-order gradient approximations has relegated previous zeroth-order optimizers exclusively to the domain of fine tuning; a limitation we seek to correct. We devise a federated, memory-efficient zeroth-order optimizer, ZOWarmUp that permits zeroth-order training from a random initialization. ZOWarmUp leverages differing client capabilities and careful variance reduction techniques to facilitate participation of under-represented, low-resource clients in model training. Like other federated zeroth-order methods, ZOWarmUp eliminates the need for edge devices to transmit their full gradients to the server and instead relies on only a small set of random seeds, rendering the up-link communication cost negligible. We present experiments using various datasets and model architectures to show that ZOWarmUp is a robust algorithm that can can be applied under a wide variety of circumstances. For systems with a high proportion of edge devices that would otherwise be excluded from training, this algorithm provides access to a greater volume and diversity of data, thus improving training outcomes.

2026-04-05

Conference on Lifelong Learning Agents (published)

proceedings.mlr.press

Covenant-72B: Pre-Training a 72B LLM with Trustless Peers Over-the-Internet

Joel Lidin

Amir Sarfi

Erfan Miahi

Quentin Anthony

Shivam Chauhan

Evangelos Pappas

Benjamin Therien

Samuel Dare

Recently, there has been increased interest in globally distributed training, which has the promise to both reduce training costs and democr… (see more)atize participation in building large-scale foundation models. However, existing models trained in a globally distributed manner are relatively small in scale and have only been trained with whitelisted participants. Therefore, they do not yet realize the full promise of democratized participation. In this report, we describe Covenant-72B, an LLM produced by the largest collaborative globally distributed pre-training run (in terms of both compute and model scale), which simultaneously allowed open, permissionless participation supported by a live blockchain protocol. We utilized a state-of-the-art communication-efficient optimizer, SparseLoCo, supporting dynamic participation with peers joining and leaving freely. Our model, pre-trained on approximately 1.1T tokens, performs competitively with fully centralized models pre-trained on similar or higher compute budgets, demonstrating that fully democratized, non-whitelisted participation is not only feasible, but can be achieved at unprecedented scale for a globally distributed pre-training run.

2026-03-08

arXiv (preprint)

End-to-End Fine-Tuning of 3D Texture Generation using Differentiable Rewards

Amirhossein Zamani

Tianhao Xie

Amir G. Aghdam

Tiberiu Popa

While recent 3D generative models can produce high-quality texture images, they often fail to capture human preferences or meet task-specifi… (see more)c requirements. Moreover, a core challenge in the 3D texture generation domain is that most existing approaches rely on repeated calls to 2D text-to-image generative models, which lack an inherent understanding of the 3D structure of the input 3D mesh object. To alleviate these issues, we propose an end-to-end differentiable, reinforcement-learning-free framework that embeds human feedback, expressed as differentiable reward functions, directly into the 3D texture synthesis pipeline. By back-propagating preference signals through both geometric and appearance modules of the proposed framework, our method generates textures that respect the 3D geometry structure and align with desired criteria. To demonstrate its versatility, we introduce three novel geometry-aware reward functions, which offer a more controllable and interpretable pathway for creating high-quality 3D content from natural language. By conducting qualitative, quantitative, and user-preference evaluations against state-of-the-art methods, we demonstrate that our proposed strategy consistently outperforms existing approaches. Our implementation code is publicly available at: https://github.com/AHHHZ975/Differentiable-Texture-Learning

2026-03-05

IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (published)

Heterogeneous Low-Bandwidth Pre-Training of LLMs

Yazan Obeidi

Amir Sarfi

Joel Lidin

Paul Janson

Pre-training large language models (LLMs) increasingly requires distributed compute, yet bandwidth constraints make it difficult to scale be… (see more)yond well-provisioned datacenters-especially when model parallelism forces frequent, large inter-device communications. We study whether SparseLoCo, a low-communication data parallel method based on infrequent synchronization and sparse pseudo-gradient exchange, can be combined with low-bandwidth pipeline model parallelism via activation and activation-gradient compression. We introduce a heterogeneous distributed training framework where some participants host full replicas on high-bandwidth interconnects, while resource-limited participants are grouped to jointly instantiate a replica using pipeline parallelism with subspace-projected inter-stage communication. To make the recently introduced subspace pipeline compression compatible with SparseLoCo, we study a number of adaptations. Across large-scale language modeling experiments (178M-1B parameters) on standard pretraining corpora, we find that activation compression composes with SparseLoCo at modest cost, while selective (heterogeneous) compression consistently improves the loss-communication tradeoff relative to compressing all replicas-especially at aggressive compression ratios. These results suggest a practical path to incorporating low-bandwidth model parallelism and heterogeneous participants into LLM pre-training.

2026-03-02

DeLTa @ International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)

DiffuMamba: High-Throughput Diffusion LMs with Mamba Backbone

Vaibhav Singh

Oleksiy Ostapenko

Pierre-Andre Noel

Torsten Scholak

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, yet their reliance on Transforme… (see more)r backbones limits inference efficiency due to quadratic attention or KV-cache overhead. We introduce DiffuMamba, a masked diffusion language model built on a bidirectional Mamba backbone that combines the diffusion objective with linear-time sequence modeling, and DiffuMamba-H, a hybrid variant with interleaved attention. Across scales up to 1.3B parameters, our models match Transformer-based diffusion in downstream performance while achieving up to 8.2× and 4.3× higher inference throughput, respectively, on long sequences. We further present a systematic analysis of inference efficiency across modern DLM variants, combining asymptotic complexity with empirical measurements. Notably, cache-efficient block diffusion with Mamba mixers emerges as the only strategy that scales linearly with sequence length and achieves the strongest performance across all baselines, suggesting a promising direction for future diffusion-based generation systems.

2026-03-01

MM_Intelligence @ International Conference on Learning Representations (poster)