标签：#learning

From TF's website: Quantization aware training emulates inference-time quantization, creating a model that downstream tools will use to produce actually quantized models. So is it designed to work with a very specific quantization method (for Gemma-4, presumably, Google's own)? Or would it make sense to use alternative quantization methods? According to the benchmarks unsloth released, its (alternative) quantizations of Gemma-4-QAT are closer to the QAT fine-tunes, but is it a good thing, or does it defeat the purpose of QAT? submitted by /u/we_are_mammals [link] [留言]

I'm planning to submit a paper to either NMI, but this will be my first paper to a nature-like venue. Would love a quick chat with anyone that has experience. My paper's specifically more geared towards signal processing with ML for a specific subfield of engineering. But can be interdisciplinary. submitted by /u/PlateLive8645 [link] [留言]

If you're a networking instructor — at a university, technical college, boot camp, or corporate training program — you know the frustration of teaching the OSI Model. Static PowerPoint slides can only do so much. Students nod along in class, but when exam time arrives, the layers blur together. The PDU names become a confusing jumble. The OSI Model Simulator by Roboticela was built with educators in mind. It transforms a passive lecture into an interactive demonstration that students engage with, remember, and take home to explore on their own. Classroom Use Cases Live Demonstration Project the simulator on a classroom screen. Have students suggest messages to send and protocols to use. Step through each layer together as a class, stopping to ask questions: "What's happening here? What header was added? What device would operate at this layer?" The interactive format maintains attention far better than any lecture. Lab Assignments Assign students to run specific simulations and document their findings: "Run HTTP and HTTPS simulations. Screenshot the Presentation Layer for each. Explain in writing what differs and why." This assignment tests both tool usage and conceptual understanding. Flipped Classroom Send students to app.osi-model-simulator.roboticela.com before class. Ask them to run three simulations and come prepared to discuss what they observed. Class time becomes richer discussion rather than basic concept delivery. Protocol Comparison Exercise Have students run simulations for all five protocols — HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP, DNS, FTP — and create a comparison chart noting the differences at each OSI layer. This develops deep protocol literacy that traditional instruction rarely achieves. Why It Works: The Science of Active Learning Research in educational psychology consistently shows that active learning produces dramatically better retention than passive instruction. The "Learning Pyramid" (Edgar Dale's Cone of Experience) suggests: Lecture: ~5% retention after 2

Networking certifications like CompTIA Network+ and Cisco's CCNA are career-defining credentials. They validate your understanding of networking fundamentals — and both exams test OSI Model knowledge extensively. In fact, the OSI Model is arguably the single most tested conceptual framework in entry-level and intermediate networking certifications. Why OSI Is So Critical for Certification Exams Exam questions on OSI take many forms: "At which layer of the OSI model does a router operate?" (Layer 3) "What PDU is used at the Transport Layer?" (Segment) "Which protocol operates at the Application Layer?" (HTTP, DNS, SMTP...) "A user cannot connect to a website. Troubleshooting should begin at which OSI layer?" (Layer 1, then up) "Which device operates at Layer 2?" (Switch) "What is the function of the Presentation Layer?" (Translation, encryption, compression) These questions seem straightforward on paper but are notoriously confusing under exam pressure without deep conceptual understanding. How the OSI Simulator Accelerates Your Studies Visual Memory Formation Research in cognitive science consistently shows that visual and kinesthetic learning creates stronger memories than text-only reading. When you watch the OSI Simulator animate your message through all seven layers, you're forming episodic memories — vivid, experience-based memories that are far more durable than rote memorization. Protocol-to-Layer Association One of the most commonly missed exam categories is protocol-to-layer mapping. The OSI Simulator makes this automatic: when you select HTTP, the Application Layer is highlighted. When you watch TCP headers form, you associate TCP with Layer 4 viscerally, not just verbally. PDU Name Mastery Data, Segment, Packet, Frame, Bits — the five PDU names are shown explicitly at each layer in the simulator. After running 10 simulations, these names become second nature. No flashcard can match this experiential learning. Troubleshooting Framework Practice Network+ an

The Physical Layer's choice of transmission medium profoundly affects the performance, cost, security, and reliability of a network. The OSI Model Simulator supports all five major media types — making it a powerful tool for understanding how physical choices ripple up through all seven OSI layers. Medium Speed Max Distance Security Cost Ethernet Up to 10 Gbps+ 100m (Cat6a) High (physical access) Low Wi-Fi Up to ~9.6 Gbps (Wi-Fi 6) ~100m indoor Medium (WPA3) Low Fiber Optic Terabits/s 100s of km Very High High Coaxial Up to 1 Gbps 500m (RG-8) Medium Medium Radio Variable (5G: Gbps) km to global (satellite) Low–Medium Variable Ethernet: The Reliable Standard Ethernet is the dominant wired networking standard in homes, offices, and data centers. Using twisted-pair copper cables (Cat5e, Cat6, Cat6a), it provides reliable, high-speed connectivity with predictable latency. The IEEE 802.3 standard governs Ethernet, and modern variants include 1GbE, 10GbE, 25GbE, 40GbE, and 100GbE. Wi-Fi: Wireless Freedom Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) eliminated the need for physical cables in most consumer settings. Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) and Wi-Fi 6E deliver impressive speeds, but shared medium access, interference, and radio propagation challenges mean it will never fully replace wired Ethernet for critical applications. Fiber Optic: The Internet's Backbone Fiber optic cables carry data as pulses of light through glass or plastic strands. They're immune to electromagnetic interference, support enormous bandwidth, and can span continents — literally. Every major internet exchange, submarine cable, and data center interconnect uses fiber. Coaxial Cable: The Cable TV Legacy Coaxial cable — familiar from cable TV connections — consists of a central conductor surrounded by insulating layers and a braided metal shield. DOCSIS-based cable internet connections (common from ISPs like Comcast) use coaxial as the last-mile medium. Radio: Wireless at Scale From the cellular 5G network in your pocket to satellite

When I started learning Data Science, I expected to spend my first week writing Python code, exploring machine learning models, and working with advanced tools. Instead, I spent most of my time in Excel. At first, it felt underwhelming—just rows, columns, and simple spreadsheets. But within a few days, I realized something important: Excel is not a basic tool at all. It is one of the most widely used tools in data analysis, business decision-making, and reporting. 📊 Real-World Uses of Excel Excel is widely used across industries for handling and analyzing data. Some of the most common uses include: Business Analysis - Tracking sales and identifying trend Accounting and Budgeting - Managing Expenses, Profits and Financial reports Marketing Analysis - Measuring campaigns performance and customer behavior Data Entry and Management - organizing large datasets efficiently Businesses rely on Excel because it helps turn raw data into meaningful insights for decision making. 🛠️ Key Excel Features I Learned In my first week, I explored several important Excel Features that help with data organization and analysis: Excel Interface Overview - I first explored how Excel is organized, including Ribbon, Worksheets, Cell, Row, Columns, and formula bar. this helped me understand how to navigate the tool before working with data Data Sorting - Organizing data by numbers, Text and Dates Filtering - Showing only relevant data based on condition Data Validation - Ensuring accurate and consistent data entry Freeze Panes - Keeping header Visible while scrolling through large datasets. These features make working with data much easier, faster and more structured. 🧮 Basic Excel Functions I learned I was also introduced to some basic Excel functions used in Data Analysis. Aggregate Functions - SUM - Add all values in a range - AVERAGE - Calculate the mean of a dataset - COUNT - Counts numerical entries in a dataset Conditional Functions - SUMIF () and SUMIFS()** - Add values that meets one

Optimizing Laravel Performance: Conquering the N+1 Query Problem with Eager Loading As full-stack developers, building performant applications is a continuous challenge. One of the most insidious yet common performance bottlenecks encountered in Laravel applications is the "N+1 query problem." This issue can significantly degrade response times, inflate database load, and ultimately lead to a poor user experience. Fortunately, Laravel provides a powerful and elegant solution: eager loading using the with() method. This tutorial will walk you through understanding the N+1 problem and effectively using eager loading to keep your applications fast and efficient. Understanding the N+1 Query Problem Imagine a scenario where you need to display a list of blog posts, and for each post, you also want to show the name of its author. In a typical Laravel application, your Post model would likely have a belongsTo relationship with a User model. Let's look at a common, yet inefficient, way this might be implemented: 1. The Inefficient N+1 Approach Consider a controller fetching all posts and a view attempting to display the author's name: app/Http/Controllers/PostController.php (N+1 Example): namespace App\Http\Controllers ; use App\Models\Post ; use Illuminate\Http\Request ; class PostController extends Controller { public function index () { $posts = Post :: all (); // Fetches all posts return view ( 'posts.index' , compact ( 'posts' )); } } resources/views/posts/index.blade.php (N+1 Example): <h1>Blog Posts</h1> @foreach ($posts as $post) <div class="post-item"> <h2>{{ $post->title }}</h2> <p>Author: {{ $post->user->name }}</p> <!-- Accessing related user inside loop --> <p>{{ Str::limit($post->body, 150) }}</p> </div> @endforeach Why this is N+1: 1 Query: SELECT * FROM posts; – This initial query fetches all your posts. N Queries: For each $post in the loop, when you access $post->user->name , Laravel lazy-loads the associated User model. If you have 10 posts, this will exe

maybe this should be asked in the Fc26 game subreddit but not sure. Anyway I just saw a video of someone predicting the winner of the world cup using the simulate match feature in the game but he only did it once. Would running this feature 100-1000 times give a significant result ? or is that feature only based on luck ? submitted by /u/Stillane [link] [留言]

Most developers learn CSS specificity once. They remember: #id > .class > div Then move on. Until one day… Everything looks correct. The CSS is present. The selector is correct. The z-index looks higher. And yet the UI is broken. That’s when CSS specificity stops being a beginner topic and becomes a production debugging problem. The Production Incident That Started This Recently, I was working on a microfrontend application. Everything worked fine initially. I opened a page, launched a modal and the UI looked correct. Then I navigated to another microfrontend. Its CSS got loaded. After returning to the original microfrontend, suddenly: ❌ Modal appeared behind page content ❌ Overlay behaved incorrectly ❌ z-index looked correct but wasn't working DevTools showed my CSS rule still existed. Yet another CSS rule was winning. The culprit? CSS Specificity. 🧠 What is CSS Specificity? CSS specificity is the algorithm browsers use to decide: Which CSS rule wins when multiple rules target the same element. Browsers don't simply apply: "The last CSS rule." That's one of the biggest misconceptions. Specificity is calculated first. Only when specificity is equal does source order become important. ⚔️ Example .modal { z-index : 9999 ; } .some-library .modal { z-index : 100 ; } HTML: <div class= "some-library" > <div class= "modal" ></div> </div> Many developers expect: .modal to win because the value is larger. But CSS doesn't compare values first. It compares selectors. 🧮 How Specificity Works Specificity is usually represented as: ID - CLASS - TYPE Specificity Table Selector Specificity * 0-0-0 div 0-0-1 .modal 0-1-0 [type="text"] 0-1-0 :hover 0-1-0 #dialog 1-0-0 Inline Style Highest MDN defines specificity as the weight browsers calculate to determine which declaration gets applied when multiple selectors match the same element. Example Calculation Selector: button .primary Contains: button → 0 -0-1 .primary → 0 -1-0 Total: 0-1-1 Another selector: #header button .primary Contai

Hi all, Lately I have been working on creating a package for Multi Agent RL based drone environments with different objectives, all bundled into a single GitHub repository: tau-intelligence/MuJoCo-drones-gym. I am currently trying to organize things for RL community people, with a couple more tools coming soon. But right now, I want to make it useful for the community and hence would love some feedback from different people, about how I could improve it, incorporate more things into it or fix some broken implementation. Also everyone is welcome to raise issues on the repo. Thank you for the support. PS: I have some research publications at RL and ML venues regarding work on RL, though I still want to consider myself as a student of the field and hence would love your help here. submitted by /u/MT1699 [link] [留言]

The first trillionaire in history won't make their money from banking, oil, or real estate. They'll make it from rockets and algorithms — and the implications of that distinction are genuinely unsettling. The Problem It's Solving (Or Creating) SpaceX is preparing for its IPO. Analysts tracking the raise estimate it will push Elon Musk's net worth past the trillion-dollar threshold, making him not just the richest person on Earth by a wide margin, but something qualitatively different from every billionaire before him. The standard framing treats this as a wealth story. It isn't. A billionaire is powerful because they have money. A trillionaire is powerful because, at that scale, they stop needing permission from anyone — governments, investors, boards, markets. The constraints that keep institutional power in check simply don't apply anymore. How Trillionaire-Scale Power Actually Works There's a clean way to understand the difference. A billionaire can fund political candidates, buy media, lobby aggressively. Another billionaire can fund the opposition. It's expensive, but the system has a counter. A trillionaire doesn't have a counter. They are the counter. They can simultaneously build the communications infrastructure (Starlink), the transportation layer (SpaceX), the compute stack (through xAI), and the political attention economy (via platform ownership). No single democratic institution was designed to regulate someone who owns the pipes that the institution runs on. Arnab Ray's piece in today's Times of India puts it directly: a trillionaire's thoughts and algorithms will shape planetary outcomes. That's not hyperbole. When Musk eventually lands people on Mars, the governance frameworks, the property rights, the social contracts of that colony — those will be engineered by him and his companies, not negotiated through any existing democratic process. What Societies Are Actually Unprepared For Most of the policy debate around billionaires focuses on tax rates

What Ollama actually is Ollama is an open-source runtime for large language models that runs on your own computer — Mac, Windows, or Linux. Think of it as the “Docker for LLMs”: instead of wrestling with Python environments, model weights, and GPU drivers, you type one command and a model is running. The pitch is simple: keep your data on your machine, pay nothing per token, and work offline. When you run ollama run gemma4, Ollama downloads the model, loads it into your GPU’s memory (or system RAM if you don’t have a GPU), and drops you into a chat prompt. That’s it. Behind that simplicity, Ollama is doing a lot of work for you: Model management — pulling, versioning, and storing models from its registry, the way a package manager handles software. Quantization — automatically using compressed (GGUF) versions of models so a 27-billion-parameter model fits in consumer memory. GPU layer allocation — deciding how much of the model lives on your GPU versus CPU, based on the VRAM you have. Context and KV-cache management — handling the memory that grows as a conversation gets longer. A REST API — exposing everything on http://localhost:11434 so your own apps can talk to it. How it works under the hood Ollama is not itself an inference engine. It’s an experience layer wrapped around one. Under the hood it uses llama.cpp, the C++ engine that does the actual math of running a quantized model efficiently on CPUs and GPUs. As of v0.19 (March 2026), Ollama also uses Apple’s MLX backend on Apple Silicon — a change that delivered enormous speedups (on an M5 Max running Qwen 3.5, decode throughput nearly doubled). The workflow looks like this: You run a command — ollama run qwen3 from the terminal, or a request to the API. Ollama resolves the model — if it isn’t already downloaded, it pulls the GGUF weights from the registry. It loads the model into memory — splitting layers between GPU and CPU based on available VRAM. It serves responses — either interactively in your terminal o

Every weekday, we averaged 10 groups. Every weekend, 15. Same karaoke bar. Same staff. Same songs. For a long time, I just accepted that gap as "normal." Weekends are busier. That's just how hospitality works, right? Wrong. It took me years to realize I wasn't looking at a staffing problem. I was looking at a funnel problem — and I had no idea what a funnel even was. The moment I noticed something was off One Tuesday afternoon, a group of four walked past the front door, looked at the menu board outside, and kept walking. I watched from the counter. I had open rooms. Competitive prices. Cold drinks. Everything they needed. But they left anyway. That one moment stuck with me. Why did they walk in? Why did they look? Why did they leave? I started tracking these moments obsessively. Not with software — just a notebook and a lot of attention. Here's what I found over six weeks: Weekdays : About 40 people walked past who paused at the sign. Of those, maybe 15 came to the door. Of those, 10 groups actually came in and paid. Weekends : About 90 people paused. 30 came to the door. 15 groups booked a room. The conversion rate was almost identical — roughly 25% from "stopped to look" to "became a customer." The difference wasn't that we were worse at converting on weekdays. We just had fewer people at the top. That's a funnel. I didn't know the term at the time. But what I was describing is exactly what marketers call a marketing funnel : Awareness — people notice you exist Interest — they stop to look Consideration — they walk to the door, check the price Action — they book a room and pay Most businesses obsess over the bottom of the funnel. Better sales scripts. Discount campaigns. Loyalty cards. I did the same. I ran Tuesday specials. I trained staff to upsell drinks. I rearranged the menu. None of it closed the gap. Because the gap wasn't at the bottom. It was at the top. On weekdays, I simply had fewer people aware we existed. What I tried instead Once I framed it as a f

We live in an era where scientific breakthroughs are published faster than we can read them. For the biohacking community, the gap between a new PubMed study on NAD+ precursors and actually knowing what dose to take is a chasm of manual research. What if you could build an LLM Agent that monitors research papers, processes them through a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipeline, and maps findings to your specific health profile? In this tutorial, we are building Paper-to-Action , a state-of-the-art agentic workflow using LangGraph , ChromaDB , and Mistral-7B . This isn't just a simple bot; it's a multi-stage reasoning engine designed to turn raw academic data into actionable health interventions. If you've been looking to master AI agents and personalized medicine automation, you’re in the right place. 🚀 The Architecture: From Raw Paper to Personalized Habit Traditional RAG pipelines are linear. To handle the nuance of medical research, we need a "looping" logic. We use LangGraph to manage the state of our agent, allowing it to decide if a paper is relevant before attempting to extract a protocol. System Flow graph TD A[Start: Keyword Trigger] --> B[Search PubMed/Arxiv API] B --> C{Relevance Filter} C -- No --> B C -- Yes --> D[Store in ChromaDB] D --> E[RAG: Extract Intervention Protocol] E --> F[Cross-Reference with User Profile] F --> G[Generate Personalized Action Plan] G --> H[End: Push to Health Checklist] Prerequisites To follow this advanced guide, you'll need: LangGraph : For the agentic state machine. ChromaDB : As our high-performance vector store. Mistral-7B : Running via Ollama or vLLM for local, private inference. Python 3.10+ Step 1: Defining the Agent State In LangGraph, everything revolves around the State . We need to track the fetched papers, the extracted data, and the final recommendation. from typing import Annotated , List , TypedDict from langgraph.graph import StateGraph , END class AgentState ( TypedDict ): keywords : List [ str ] user

While some of my recent posts have involved using the Colab extension for VS Code and the Antigravity IDE, I actually prefer working in the terminal and Vim. The new Colab CLI finally lets me work in my natural habitat, and it opens the door for autonomous workflows! Setup Currently, installation is handled via pip or uv. It's straightforward, though, I'm holding out hope for a brew formula in the future: uv tool install google-colab-cli I'm testing Version: 0.6.dev7+g510115b0c inside Ghostty. The Colab CLI is pretty solid, but I do have some feedback and nitpicks I'd like to share (but more on that later). Creating a new session Creating a session is simple: colab new [-s SESSION_NAME] [--gpu T4|L4|A100|H100] [--tpu v5e1|v6e1] : SESSION_NAME : This is optional. If you leave it blank, the CLI generates a random unique ID for you. --gpu and --tpu : The hardware accelerator flags are optional, but omitting them defaults to a standard CPU-only instance. The specific accelerator chips you can request depend on your Colab tier, which you can check via colab pay. NOTE : If you only have one active session, the CLI targets it by default. This makes the -s flag unnecessary for subsequent commands. Testing Colab CLI's capabilities CLI certainly sounds cool, but how does it handle artifacts and images? More importantly, how debuggable is it? I decided to find out by running a Fashion MNIST PyTorch example. Handling artifacts To get started, I installed my requirements using colab install torch torchvision matplotlib . If you prefer a more standard approach, you can also use colab install -r requirements.txt . Once the environment was ready, I executed the training script using colab exec -f ./fashion_mnist_TRAIN.py and here's the output: [ colab] Using unique session '8c860c' . Using CUDA device. Shape of X [ N, C, H, W]: torch.Size ([ 64, 1, 28, 28] ) Shape of y: torch.Size ([ 64] ) torch.int64 NeuralNetwork ( ( flatten ) : Flatten ( start_dim = 1, end_dim = -1 ) ( linear_re

Most explanations of TPUs and systolic arrays are either hand-wavy diagrams or papers. I wanted to see the thing actually run, so I built it. TinyTPU is a 4×4 weight-stationary systolic array in real SystemVerilog, compiled to WebAssembly, with a step-by-step browser visualization. You enter two matrices, hit run, and watch the actual hardware execute: weights loading into PEs, matrix A streaming in diagonally (the "skew" that makes systolic arrays work), partial sums accumulating down the grid, results draining from the bottom. It has three levels: L1 - isolate a single MAC cell, watch one multiply-accumulate happen L2 - the full 4×4 array executing a real matmul L3 - tiling: what happens when your matrix is bigger than the hardware Nothing on screen is faked. The visualization reads state directly from compiled RTL. If you're trying to understand how matrix multiply maps to hardware why TPUs are efficient, what "weight-stationary" actually means, why the diagonal stagger exists this might click it for you in a way papers don't. Repo: tiny-tpu Live demo: Live If this project interests you please do star the repo, if you find something needs improving open a PR, I hope ya'll check this out and give me some feedback 🙏 submitted by /u/Horror-Flamingo-2150 [link] [留言]

I’ve been thinking about a problem in current agent systems: Most agents are becoming very good at execution, but the decision layer before execution is still unclear. Coding agents, research agents, tool loops, sandboxes, workflows, and harnesses are all improving quickly. Once a human gives an intent, agents can often do a lot of useful work. But the higher-level question is still usually left to the user: What should happen next, and why? I’ve been exploring this idea through an open-source project called Spice. The simplest way to describe it is: Spice is a decision layer above agents. It is not trying to replace execution agents. Tools like Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, or other agents can still do the actual work. Instead, Spice sits before execution and tries to make the decision process explicit: what was observed what options were considered why one option was selected what trade-offs were rejected whether execution needs approval what happened afterward how that outcome should affect the next decision The current runtime is still early, but it can already be installed, configured with an LLM provider, run in the terminal, inspect Decision Cards, and hand off approved execution to external agents. The goal is to make agent behavior less of a black box. Instead of only seeing the final result of an agent task, I want to preserve the reasoning boundary before execution: what the system believed, what it chose, why it chose it, and what changed after the action. GitHub: https://github.com/Dyalwayshappy/Spice I’d love feedback from people building agents. Feel free to fork, star the repo, or share any feedback and ideas. Would love to build this together with the community. submitted by /u/Alarming_Rou_3841 [link] [留言]

This is part 3 of the Adaptive Model Routing series. Part 1 built an LLM categorizer with Groq — 8 categories, 3 tiers. Part 2 added k-NN embedding lookup in shadow mode, discovered 83% tier accuracy, and found 61% cost savings on paper. This post covers what happened next. When Phase 2 ended, I had a working embedding pool in shadow mode inside crab-bot. The category accuracy was sitting at 78.6%. Not bad — but the breakdown hid something worth looking at. Phase 3: When Validation Tells You a Category Doesn't Need to Exist The leave-one-out accuracy by category told the real story: Category Accuracy Tier casual 94% cheap simple_lookup 91% cheap creative 88% medium coding 92% strong reasoning 89% strong analysis 59% medium research_lookup 61% medium Two categories were basically a coin flip. And they were confusing each other — almost all of analysis's misses landed on research_lookup and vice versa. The obvious move would be to try fixing the categorizer prompt, tuning the LLM, or gathering more labeled data. I was about to go down that road when I noticed the column next to the accuracy: both categories mapped to the same tier . Medium. That changed everything. The question stopped being "why can't the model tell these apart?" and became: "what routing decision are we actually getting wrong?" The answer was zero. A misclassification between analysis and research_lookup produces no routing error. The routing outcome is identical either way. The confusion wasn't a model failure — it was a signal from the embedding space that the boundary between these two categories was artificial. If k-NN can't draw a line between them in 384 dimensions with 1,300 examples, maybe the line doesn't belong there. Decision: merge research_lookup into analysis. -- Re-label 243 rows where category was 'research_lookup' UPDATE routing_log SET category = 'analysis' WHERE category = 'research_lookup' ; The embeddings didn't change. The vectors were already correct — only the label stored al

Google shipped Gemma 4 12B this week — a model that packs near-26B performance into something that runs on a consumer laptop with 16GB of RAM or unified memory. That alone would be notable. But the more significant move is the architecture: no multimodal encoders at all. Vision and audio go straight into the LLM backbone. "Gemma 4 12B packages powerful capabilities inside a reduced memory footprint. It is also our first mid-sized model to feature native audio inputs." — Google DeepMind What actually changed Encoder-free multimodal : Traditional multimodal models pipe images and audio through separate encoder networks before the LLM ever sees them. Gemma 4 12B removes those entirely. Vision gets a lightweight embedding module (a single matrix multiplication + positional embedding). Audio skips encoding altogether — the raw signal is projected directly into the same token space as text. Near-26B benchmark performance at half the footprint : On standard benchmarks it runs neck-and-neck with Gemma 4 26B, and actually surpasses it on DocVQA (document visual question answering). A new slot in the lineup : April's Gemma 4 release had E2B/E4B for mobile/IoT, and 26B/31B for heavier compute. The 12B fills the gap — more capable than edge models, runnable without a GPU server. Drafter-ready : Ships with Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) drafters to reduce inference latency. Apache 2.0 : Open weights, available now on Hugging Face, Kaggle, Ollama, and LM Studio. Why the architecture matters Encoder-free isn't just an efficiency hack — it's a different architectural bet. Separate encoders add latency, memory overhead, and a seam in the stack that limits how tightly vision and language reasoning can be integrated. Removing them means the LLM backbone handles the full chain from pixels and audio waveforms to text output, which allows for tighter cross-modal understanding rather than bolted-on modalities. Whether that bet pays off at scale is still an open question. But for local deplo

I have a paper accepted at a non-archival ICML workshop this year, and I am trying to decide whether it is worth registering and attending. By coincidence, I will already be in Seoul around that time, but I would have to pay the workshop registration fee (~$400) out of my own pocket. I would only be registering for the workshop day since I have other commitments during the rest of the conference. I am thinking of applying to PhD programs this fall (I applied this year too, but didn't get in), and the workshop speakers and panellists look genuinely great. Not sure what the real benefits are here or whether I should go for it. For context, I am also attending ACL 2026 this year, but that trip is fortunately sponsored, so this would be a separate personal expense. I would also appreciate guidance on how non-archival workshops work in general. Since the paper is non-archival and not formally published (at least to my understanding), is registration still expected or required for accepted papers? Do authors typically attend and present in person, or is it common to skip attendance and conference registration? Has anyone been in a similar situation? I want to understand the benefits of this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated because I honestly have no idea how to evaluate this. submitted by /u/YOYOBOYOO [link] [留言]