Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs through Truncated SVD Layers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Kamali, Kaivan, Schweighofer, Kajetan, Shahrzad, Hormoz, Francon, Olivier, Hodjat, Babak, Miikkulainen, Risto
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Kamali, Kaivan
Schweighofer, Kajetan
Shahrzad, Hormoz
Francon, Olivier
Hodjat, Babak
Miikkulainen, Risto
author_facet Kamali, Kaivan
Schweighofer, Kajetan
Shahrzad, Hormoz
Francon, Olivier
Hodjat, Babak
Miikkulainen, Risto
contents The massive scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made pretraining increasingly cost-prohibitive. While low-rank representation and orthonormal weight matrices could in principle reduce parameter counts and computational overhead, most existing methods rely on static rank selection and do not enforce weight orthonormality due to high computational cost. This paper introduces TSVD, a framework that maintains low rank and strict orthonormality throughout the training process. It utilizes a spectral energy-based heuristic for adaptive rank selection, and a caching mechanisms to maintain orthonormality. Theoretical analysis justifies the advantage of the approach in pretraining dynamics and experiments across various model scales demonstrate that it is effective empirically. TSVD matches or exceeds the performance of full-parameter baselines while significantly reducing compute requirements. The approach thus offers a well-founded, practical, and scalable path toward efficient high-performance LLM pretraining.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_28573
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs through Truncated SVD Layers
Kamali, Kaivan
Schweighofer, Kajetan
Shahrzad, Hormoz
Francon, Olivier
Hodjat, Babak
Miikkulainen, Risto
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The massive scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made pretraining increasingly cost-prohibitive. While low-rank representation and orthonormal weight matrices could in principle reduce parameter counts and computational overhead, most existing methods rely on static rank selection and do not enforce weight orthonormality due to high computational cost. This paper introduces TSVD, a framework that maintains low rank and strict orthonormality throughout the training process. It utilizes a spectral energy-based heuristic for adaptive rank selection, and a caching mechanisms to maintain orthonormality. Theoretical analysis justifies the advantage of the approach in pretraining dynamics and experiments across various model scales demonstrate that it is effective empirically. TSVD matches or exceeds the performance of full-parameter baselines while significantly reducing compute requirements. The approach thus offers a well-founded, practical, and scalable path toward efficient high-performance LLM pretraining.
title Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs through Truncated SVD Layers
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28573