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Oct 28

DARE the Extreme: Revisiting Delta-Parameter Pruning For Fine-Tuned Models

Storing open-source fine-tuned models separately introduces redundancy and increases response times in applications utilizing multiple models. Delta-parameter pruning (DPP), particularly the random drop and rescale (DARE) method proposed by Yu et al., addresses this by pruning the majority of delta parameters--the differences between fine-tuned and pre-trained model weights--while typically maintaining minimal performance loss. However, DARE fails when either the pruning rate or the magnitude of the delta parameters is large. We highlight two key reasons for this failure: (1) an excessively large rescaling factor as pruning rates increase, and (2) high mean and variance in the delta parameters. To push DARE's limits, we introduce DAREx (DARE the eXtreme), which features two algorithmic improvements: (1) DAREx-q, a rescaling factor modification that significantly boosts performance at high pruning rates (e.g., >30 % on COLA and SST2 for encoder models, with even greater gains in decoder models), and (2) DAREx-L2, which combines DARE with AdamR, an in-training method that applies appropriate delta regularization before DPP. We also demonstrate that DAREx-q can be seamlessly combined with vanilla parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques like LoRA and can facilitate structural DPP. Additionally, we revisit the application of importance-based pruning techniques within DPP, demonstrating that they outperform random-based methods when delta parameters are large. Through this comprehensive study, we develop a pipeline for selecting the most appropriate DPP method under various practical scenarios.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 11, 2024

DELTA: Dynamic Layer-Aware Token Attention for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks by generating long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire growing sequence. Existing sparse attention methods reduce computation by pruning the key-value (KV) cache, yet they suffer from severe accuracy degradation on reasoning tasks due to cumulative selection errors and the dynamic importance of tokens over long derivations. We present DELTA, a training-free sparse attention mechanism that achieves computational efficiency without sacrificing model accuracy. DELTA partitions transformer layers into three groups: initial layers that use full attention, a small set of selection layers that identify salient tokens via aggregated head-level attention scores, and subsequent sparse-attention layers that attend only to the selected subset. This design preserves the full KV cache in GPU memory for accuracy, while avoiding expensive full-attention computation over many layers. On reasoning benchmarks such as AIME and GPQA-Diamond, DELTA matches or surpasses full attention in accuracy, while reducing the number of attended tokens by up to 5times and delivering 1.5times end-to-end speedup. Our results show that selective reuse of intermediate attention maps offers a robust path toward efficient long-context reasoning.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 10, 2025

A Frame is Worth One Token: Efficient Generative World Modeling with Delta Tokens

Anticipating diverse future states is a central challenge in video world modeling. Discriminative world models produce a deterministic prediction that implicitly averages over possible futures, while existing generative world models remain computationally expensive. Recent work demonstrates that predicting the future in the feature space of a vision foundation model (VFM), rather than a latent space optimized for pixel reconstruction, requires significantly fewer world model parameters. However, most such approaches remain discriminative. In this work, we introduce DeltaTok, a tokenizer that encodes the VFM feature difference between consecutive frames into a single continuous "delta" token, and DeltaWorld, a generative world model operating on these tokens to efficiently generate diverse plausible futures. Delta tokens reduce video from a three-dimensional spatio-temporal representation to a one-dimensional temporal sequence, for example yielding a 1,024x token reduction with 512x512 frames. This compact representation enables tractable multi-hypothesis training, where many futures are generated in parallel and only the best is supervised. At inference, this leads to diverse predictions in a single forward pass. Experiments on dense forecasting tasks demonstrate that DeltaWorld forecasts futures that more closely align with real-world outcomes, while having over 35x fewer parameters and using 2,000x fewer FLOPs than existing generative world models. Code and weights: https://deltatok.github.io.

amazon Amazon
·
Apr 5 2

Delta-Adapter: Scalable Exemplar-Based Image Editing with Single-Pair Supervision

Exemplar-based image editing applies a transformation defined by a source-target image pair to a new query image. Existing methods rely on a pair-of-pairs supervision paradigm, requiring two image pairs sharing the same edit semantics to learn the target transformation. This constraint makes training data difficult to curate at scale and limits generalization across diverse edit types. We propose Delta-Adapter, a method that learns transferable editing semantics under single-pair supervision, requiring no textual guidance. Rather than directly exposing the exemplar pair to the model, we leverage a pre-trained vision encoder to extract a semantic delta that encodes the visual transformation between the two images. This semantic delta is injected into a pre-trained image editing model via a Perceiver-based adapter. Since the target image is never directly visible to the model, it can serve as the prediction target, enabling single-pair supervision without requiring additional exemplar pairs. This formulation allows us to leverage existing large-scale editing datasets for training. To further promote faithful transformation transfer, we introduce a semantic delta consistency loss that aligns the semantic change of the generated output with the ground-truth semantic delta extracted from the exemplar pair. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Delta-Adapter consistently improves both editing accuracy and content consistency over four strong baselines on seen editing tasks, while also generalizing more effectively to unseen editing tasks. Code will be available at https://delta-adapter.github.io.

  • 8 authors
·
May 7 2

Delta Attention Residuals

Attention Residuals replace standard additive residual connections with learned softmax attention over previous layer outputs, enabling selective cross-layer routing. However, standard Attention Residuals still attend over cumulative hidden states in previous layers, which are highly redundant. We show that this redundancy leads to routing collapse in deeper layers: attention weights become low-contrast and closer to uniform (max weight {approx}0.2), limiting the model's ability to select informative states in previous layers. This raises a key but underexplored design question: what layer-wise representations should be routed in Attention Residuals? To answer this question, we propose Delta Attention Residuals, which attend over deltas -- the change introduced by each sublayer (v_i = h_{i+1} - h_i) -- instead of cumulative states. Delta representations are structurally diverse and yield higher-contrast attention distributions (max weight {approx}0.6), enabling more selective and effective routing across layers. This principle applies at both per-sublayer and block granularity. Across all tested scales (220M--7.6B), Delta Attention Residuals consistently outperform both standard residuals and Attention Residuals, with 1.7--8.2\% validation perplexity gains. Delta Attention Residuals also enables converting pretrained checkpoints into Delta Attention Residuals via standard fine-tuning. Code is available at https://github.com/wdlctc/delta-attention-residuals-code.

  • 3 authors
·
May 12 4

DelTA: Discriminative Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a central technique for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. Despite its effectiveness, how response-level rewards translate into token-level probability changes remains poorly understood. We introduce a discriminator view of RLVR updates, showing that the policy-gradient update direction implicitly acts as a linear discriminator over token-gradient vectors and thereby determines which token probabilities are increased or decreased during learning. Under standard sequence-level RLVR, this discriminator is constructed from positive- and negative-side centroids formed by advantage-weighted averaging of token-gradient vectors. However, such centroid construction can be dominated by shared high-frequency patterns, such as formatting tokens, diluting sparse yet discriminative directions that better distinguish high-reward responses from low-reward ones. To address this limitation, we propose DelTA, a discriminative token credit assignment method that estimates token coefficients to amplify side-specific token-gradient directions and downweight shared or weakly discriminative ones. These coefficients reweight a self-normalized RLVR surrogate, making the effective side-wise centroids more contrastive and thereby reshaping the RLVR update direction. On seven mathematical benchmarks, DelTA outperforms the strongest same-scale baselines by 3.26 and 2.62 average points on Qwen3-8B-Base and Qwen3-14B-Base, respectively. Additional results on code generation, a different backbone, and out-of-domain evaluations further demonstrate the generalization ability of DelTA.

  • 3 authors
·
May 19 1

Gated DeltaNet-2: Decoupling Erase and Write in Linear Attention

Linear attention replaces the unbounded cache of softmax attention with a fixed-size recurrent state, reducing sequence mixing to linear time and decoding to constant memory. The hard part is not just what to forget, but how to edit this compressed memory without scrambling existing associations. Delta-rule models subtract the current read before writing a new value, and Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) sharpens forgetting with channel-wise decay. But the active edit still uses a single scalar gate to control two different things: how much old content to erase on the key side and how much new content to commit on the value side. We introduce Gated DeltaNet-2, which generalizes both Gated DeltaNet and KDA by inheriting adaptive forgetting and channel-wise decay while addressing their shared limitation, the scalar tie between erasing and writing. Gated Delta Rule-2 separates these roles with a channel-wise erase gate b_t and a channel-wise write gate w_t, reducing to KDA when both gates collapse to the same scalar and to Gated DeltaNet when the decay also collapses. We derive a fast-weight update view, a chunkwise WY algorithm with channel-wise decay absorbed into asymmetric erase factors, and a gate-aware backward pass that preserves efficient parallel training. At 1.3B parameters trained on 100B FineWeb-Edu tokens, Gated DeltaNet-2 achieves the strongest overall results among Mamba-2, Gated DeltaNet, KDA, and Mamba-3 variants across language modeling, commonsense reasoning, and retrieval. Its advantage is most pronounced on long-context RULER needle-in-a-haystack benchmarks, where it improves the evaluated multi-key retrieval setting and remains strong in both recurrent and hybrid settings. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/GatedDeltaNet-2.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
May 20 1

Erase-then-Delta Attention: Decoupling Erase and Write Addresses in Delta-Rule Linear Attention

Delta-rule linear attention improves recurrent memory updates by correcting what is already stored at the current write address before writing new content. However, the active correction is still anchored to that same write address. As a result, stale information stored at a different address cannot be actively removed before new content is written elsewhere. We propose Erase-then-Delta Attention (EDA), a memory update rule that decouples where to erase from where to write. The key insight is that recurrent memory models should not only correct the current write, but also selectively suppress outdated memory at an independently chosen address. Concretely, our method first applies a targeted erase step along a learned erase direction, and then performs the standard delta-style corrective write along the current write direction. This preserves the corrective behavior of delta-rule updates while expanding their memory-management capacity. Language-model pretraining experiments across dense 2.5B and MoE 25B-A2.8B model families show that EDA performs best in both settings. The gain persists after 80B-token long-context midtraining of the MoE models, where EDA also performs best in long-context evaluations from 4k to 128k contexts. A compact update analysis and memory-state probes suggest why: EDA keeps the delta-rule corrective write intact while allocating an additional cleanup path most strongly when passive decay is weak. These results suggest that recurrent memory models should decide not only what to write, but also what stale information to erase and where.

  • 18 authors
·
Jun 24

Kalman Delta Networks: Uncertainty-aware Associative Memory

Linear attention is increasingly used in frontier language models for efficient long-context inference and constant-memory decoding. Its fixed-size recurrent memory, however, requires an online decision at each token: what to write and how strongly to overwrite existing associations before knowing which information future queries will require. Delta-rule models learn this strength from the current token embedding but do not track confidence in the memory estimate, preventing each write from adapting to accumulated evidence. To represent this uncertainty explicitly, we reformulate recurrent associative memory as a linear--Gaussian state-space model, for which the Kalman filter is the optimal recursive estimator, and introduce a new family of models, Kalman Delta Networks (KDNs). Within KDNs, the transition propagates both the memory state and its uncertainty, allowing the Kalman gain to weight each residual write by accumulated evidence and observation reliability. Under this formulation, Delta-style updates emerge as a special case that substitutes a token-wise isotropic surrogate for predictive covariance and omits covariance tracking. Exact tracking, however, entails a dense, state-dependent Riccati recursion that is poorly suited to GPU-parallel linear-attention scans. To address this issue, we introduce two scan-compatible KDN approximations. Diagonal KDN projects each one-step posterior onto the diagonal Gaussian family through online mean-field variational inference, whereas Isotropic KDN uses an isotropic approximation with a single uncertainty scalar per head. Their uncertainty recurrences are Mobius maps, enabling associative scans with logarithmic parallel depth. Across controlled pretraining at 750M and 1.3B parameters, KDN variants consistently improve perplexity and mean downstream accuracy over state-of-the-art linear-attention models.

Delta-JEPA: Learning Action-Sensitive World Models via Latent Difference Decoding

Learning visual world models for planning requires compact latent dynamics that remain sensitive to actions, yet reconstruction-free joint-embedding objectives can collapse to action-insensitive representations. We propose Delta-JEPA, an end-to-end reconstruction-free world model that augments latent forward prediction with a Latent Difference Action Decoder (LDAD). Unlike inverse decoders that infer actions from concatenated endpoint embeddings, LDAD reconstructs the executed action from the latent displacement between consecutive observations. This displacement-level supervision directly regularizes transition geometry: adjacent embeddings cannot collapse without losing action information, and different actions are encouraged to induce distinguishable latent changes for rollout-based planning. Delta-JEPA uses only latent prediction and action reconstruction, avoiding pixel reconstruction and distribution-matching regularizers. Across four visual continuous-control tasks, Delta-JEPA improves planning over JEPA-based and representation-learning world model baselines. Ablations show that displacement-based action decoding is consistently more effective than endpoint concatenation, and action-sensitivity analyses show clearer action-conditioned latent responses. These results indicate that supervising latent differences is a simple and effective mechanism for collapse-resistant and action-sensitive world model learning.

  • 14 authors
·
Jun 29 1

Decoding the Delta: Unifying Remote Sensing Change Detection and Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models

While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in general vision-language tasks, their application to remote sensing change understanding is hindered by a fundamental "temporal blindness". Existing architectures lack intrinsic mechanisms for multi-temporal contrastive reasoning and struggle with precise spatial grounding. To address this, we first introduce Delta-QA, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 180k visual question-answering samples. Delta-QA unifies pixel-level segmentation and visual question answering across bi- and tri-temporal scenarios, structuring change interpretation into four progressive cognitive dimensions. Methodologically, we propose Delta-LLaVA, a novel MLLM framework explicitly tailored for multi-temporal remote sensing interpretation. It overcomes the limitations of naive feature concatenation through three core innovations: a Change-Enhanced Attention module that systematically isolates and amplifies visual differences, a Change-SEG module utilizing Change Prior Embedding to extract differentiable difference features as input for the LLM, and Local Causal Attention to prevent cross-temporal contextual leakage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Delta-LLaVA decisively outperforms leading generalist MLLMs and specialized segmentation models in complex change deduction and high-precision boundary localization, establishing a unified framework for earth observation intelligence.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 14

Vision-Language-Delta-Action: Learning Compact Deltas as Actionable Transition Interfaces for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation is not merely observation-to-action generation, but the realization of task-specified state changes in the physical world. Existing vision-language-action (VLA) methods directly learn observation-to-action mappings, imposing a substantial learning burden due to the gap between semantic understanding and action execution. Although world-action models (WAMs) improve control through future prediction, modeling complete future states wastes capacity on static appearance and action-irrelevant changes. We propose Vision-Language-Delta-Action (VLDA), a paradigm that reformulates full future prediction as compact actionable transition modeling. Its core is a compact Delta variable that captures latent world-state changes, serving as an interface between vision-language understanding and action generation. VLDA learns Delta through a unified objective composed of the Local Transition Filter (LT-Filter) and Global Transition Anchor (GT-Anchor). LT-Filter captures task-relevant manipulation-centric changes while suppressing static reconstruction biases. GT-Anchor provides coarse future-level regularization to preserve the overall direction of state changes. Delta-Driven Action Refinement (DDAR) further grounds Delta in the action manifold and injects it as a structured seed to guide action denoising. We implement VLDA within LoongForge, an open-source training framework for large-scale foundation and embodied models, using its modular and distributed infrastructure for unified two-stage optimization. Experiments show that VLDA improves long-horizon consistency, robustness, and generalization, validating actionable Delta as an alternative to direct action prediction and full future-state modeling.

LoongForge LoongForge
·
Oct 18 2

DeltaLLM: A Training-Free Framework Exploiting Temporal Sparsity for Efficient Edge LLM Inference

Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices remains challenging due to their quadratically increasing computations with the sequence length. Existing studies for dynamic attention pruning are designed for hardware with massively parallel computation capabilities, such as GPUs or TPUs, and aim at long context lengths (e.g., 64K), making them unsuitable for edge scenarios. We present DeltaLLM, a training-free framework that exploits temporal sparsity in attention patterns to enable efficient LLM inference across both the prefilling and decoding stages, on resource-constrained edge devices. DeltaLLM introduces an accuracy- and memory-aware delta matrix construction strategy that introduces temporal sparsity, and a context-aware hybrid attention mechanism that combines full attention in a local context window with delta approximation outside it to increase accuracy. We evaluate our framework on the edge-device-friendly BitNet-b1.58-2B-4T model and Llama3.2-1B-Instruct model across diverse language tasks. The results show that on BitNet, our framework increases the attention sparsity from 0% to 60% during the prefilling stage with slight accuracy improvement on the WG task, and 0% to 57% across both the prefilling and decoding stages, with even higher F1 score from 29.63 to 30.97 on SQuAD-v2 task. On the Llama model, it can also achieve up to 60% sparsity during the prefilling stage and around 57% across both stages with negligible accuracy drop. These results demonstrate that DeltaLLM offers a promising solution for efficient edge deployment, requiring no fine-tuning and seamlessly integrating with existing inference pipelines.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 25, 2025

DeltaPrompts: Escaping the Zero-Delta Trap in Multimodal Distillation

Distillation enables compact Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to obtain strong reasoning capabilities, yet the prompts driving this process are typically chosen via simple heuristics or aggregated from off-the-shelf datasets. We reveal a critical inefficiency in this approach: up to 69% of the prompts in standard chart / document reasoning datasets are effectively zero-delta, meaning the teacher and student already induce the exact same answer distribution. Training on these prompts provides minimal learning signal, causing student improvement to rapidly saturate regardless of data scale. To escape the zero-delta trap, we return to first principles: distillation fundamentally minimizes distributional divergence, and thus a prompt is valuable only if it exposes a functional capability gap between the teacher and student. We quantify this gap through answer divergence (Δ), demonstrating that non-zero divergence is critical for effective scaling. Building on this insight, we propose a staged synthesis pipeline that repurposes existing datasets as seeds, actively targeting student failure modes to produce better prompts. The result is DeltaPrompts, a diverse dataset of 200k synthetic, high-divergence reasoning problems. We evaluate DeltaPrompts across three distinct settings: on-policy distillation with the target teacher-student pair, transfer to a novel model family without regenerating the data, and off-policy fine-tuning of a non-reasoning model. Across all scenarios, DeltaPrompts drives substantial gains, yielding up to 15% relative improvement even on top of a highly-optimized reasoning model (e.g., Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking) -- averaged over 10 benchmarks spanning chart, document and perception-centric reasoning.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 7

DeltaWorld: Physically Consistent Interactive World Simulators via Action-Conditioned Latent Increment Learning

Interactive world simulators can provide scalable environments for robot planning, policy training, and evaluation by predicting action consequences while reducing reliance on repeated physical rollouts. To serve these applications, they must generate future image sequences that respond faithfully to robot actions and preserve the dynamics of robot-object interactions over long horizons. However, existing world models typically predict the entire next latent state and often fail to capture subtle changes induced by robot actions. Such omissions can produce physically implausible outcomes, including object interpenetration and excessive deformation. To address this limitation, we propose DeltaWorld, a physically consistent interactive world simulator for robotic manipulation. Our method introduces the Delta Latent Transition Model (Delta-LTM), which predicts action-induced latent feature changes and adds them to the current latent state to obtain the next state, rather than predicting the next latent state directly. To mitigate object interpenetration and excessive deformation in predicted future frames, Interaction-aware Latent Alignment is introduced to construct counterfactual interaction regions and supervise interaction-related latent changes. DeltaWorld is evaluated on the IWS manipulation benchmark and a self-collected cross-robot dataset covering multiple robot embodiments and manipulation tasks. On the cross-robot dataset, DeltaWorld reduces FVD by 46.6% and LPIPS by 31.1% relative to the IWS baseline. These results highlight the potential of DeltaWorld for long-horizon action-conditioned video prediction in robotic manipulation.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 1

DeltaSpace: A Semantic-aligned Feature Space for Flexible Text-guided Image Editing

Text-guided image editing faces significant challenges to training and inference flexibility. Much literature collects large amounts of annotated image-text pairs to train text-conditioned generative models from scratch, which is expensive and not efficient. After that, some approaches that leverage pre-trained vision-language models are put forward to avoid data collection, but they are also limited by either per text-prompt optimization or inference-time hyper-parameters tuning. To address these issues, we investigate and identify a specific space, referred to as CLIP DeltaSpace, where the CLIP visual feature difference of two images is semantically aligned with the CLIP textual feature difference of their corresponding text descriptions. Based on DeltaSpace, we propose a novel framework called DeltaEdit, which maps the CLIP visual feature differences to the latent space directions of a generative model during the training phase, and predicts the latent space directions from the CLIP textual feature differences during the inference phase. And this design endows DeltaEdit with two advantages: (1) text-free training; (2) generalization to various text prompts for zero-shot inference. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness and versatility of DeltaEdit with different generative models, including both the GAN model and the diffusion model, in achieving flexible text-guided image editing. Code is available at https://github.com/Yueming6568/DeltaEdit.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 12, 2023

DeltaProduct: Improving State-Tracking in Linear RNNs via Householder Products

Linear Recurrent Neural Networks (linear RNNs) have emerged as competitive alternatives to Transformers for sequence modeling, offering efficient training and linear-time inference. However, existing architectures face a fundamental trade-off between expressivity and efficiency, dictated by the structure of their state-transition matrices. Diagonal matrices, used in models such as Mamba, GLA, or mLSTM, yield fast runtime but have limited expressivity. To address this, recent architectures such as DeltaNet and RWKV-7 adopted a diagonal plus rank-1 structure, which allows simultaneous token and channel mixing, improving associative recall and, as recently shown, state-tracking when allowing negative eigenvalues in the state-transition matrices. Building on the interpretation of DeltaNet's recurrence as performing one step of online gradient descent per token on an associative recall loss, we introduce DeltaProduct, which instead takes multiple (n_h) steps per token. This naturally leads to diagonal plus rank-n_h state-transition matrices, formed as products of n_h generalized Householder transformations, providing a tunable mechanism to balance expressivity and efficiency. We provide a detailed theoretical characterization of the state-tracking capability of DeltaProduct in finite precision, showing how it improves by increasing n_h. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DeltaProduct outperforms DeltaNet in both state-tracking and language modeling, while also showing significantly improved length extrapolation capabilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 14, 2025

DeltaVLM: Interactive Remote Sensing Image Change Analysis via Instruction-guided Difference Perception

Accurate interpretation of land-cover changes in multi-temporal satellite imagery is critical for real-world scenarios. However, existing methods typically provide only one-shot change masks or static captions, limiting their ability to support interactive, query-driven analysis. In this work, we introduce remote sensing image change analysis (RSICA) as a new paradigm that combines the strengths of change detection and visual question answering to enable multi-turn, instruction-guided exploration of changes in bi-temporal remote sensing images. To support this task, we construct ChangeChat-105k, a large-scale instruction-following dataset, generated through a hybrid rule-based and GPT-assisted process, covering six interaction types: change captioning, classification, quantification, localization, open-ended question answering, and multi-turn dialogues. Building on this dataset, we propose DeltaVLM, an end-to-end architecture tailored for interactive RSICA. DeltaVLM features three innovations: (1) a fine-tuned bi-temporal vision encoder to capture temporal differences; (2) a visual difference perception module with a cross-semantic relation measuring (CSRM) mechanism to interpret changes; and (3) an instruction-guided Q-former to effectively extract query-relevant difference information from visual changes, aligning them with textual instructions. We train DeltaVLM on ChangeChat-105k using a frozen large language model, adapting only the vision and alignment modules to optimize efficiency. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate that DeltaVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance on both single-turn captioning and multi-turn interactive change analysis, outperforming existing multimodal large language models and remote sensing vision-language models. Code, dataset and pre-trained weights are available at https://github.com/hanlinwu/DeltaVLM.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 29, 2025

DeltaRubric: Generative Multimodal Reward Modeling via Joint Planning and Verification

Aligning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires reliable reward models, yet existing single-step evaluators can suffer from lazy judging, exploiting language priors over fine-grained visual verification. While rubric-based evaluation mitigates these biases in text-only settings, extending it to multimodal tasks is bottlenecked by the complexity of visual reasoning. The critical differences between responses often depend on instance-specific visual details. Robust evaluation requires dynamically synthesizing rubrics that isolate spatial and factual discrepancies. To address this, we introduce DeltaRubric, an approach that reformulates multimodal preference evaluation as a plan-and-execute process within a single MLLM. DeltaRubric operates in two steps: acting first as a Disagreement Planner, the model generates a neutral, instance-specific verification checklist. Transitioning into a Checklist Verifier, it executes these self-generated checks against the image and question to produce the final grounded judgment. We formulate DeltaRubric as a multi-role reinforcement learning problem, jointly optimizing planning and verification capabilities. Validated on Qwen3-VL 4B and 8B Instruct models, DeltaRubric achieves solid empirical gains. For instance, On VL-RewardBench, it improves base model overall accuracy by +22.6 (4B) and +18.8 (8B) points, largely outperforming standard no-rubric baselines. The results demonstrate that decomposing evaluation into structured, verifiable steps leads to more reliable and generalizable multimodal reward modeling.

DeltaV: Thinking with Visual State Updates in Unified Large Multimodal Models

Current Unified Large Multimodal Models (ULMMs) support interleaved multimodal reasoning through textual reasoning and intermediate visual states, but typically generate each visual state as a full image. This full-image generation paradigm introduces substantial visual-token redundancy and dilutes supervision on sparse yet reasoning-critical state transitions. We propose DeltaV, a ULMM that replaces full-image generation with visual updates. Conditioned on historical visual states, DeltaV incrementally predicts compact update tokens that capture the visual changes across reasoning steps, avoiding repeated modeling of unchanged content. To align the token budget of each update with the magnitude of visual change, DeltaV introduces a temporal similarity (TSIM) Router, which stops allocating tokens once the marginal reconstruction gain falls below a threshold. To support more diverse and generalizable reasoning, we further construct StructCoT, a large-scale interleaved multimodal reasoning dataset with 1.05M samples spanning 44 task domains. Experiments show that the visual-update paradigm reduces newly generated visual tokens by 55.6\% on average without compromising reconstruction fidelity, and improves multimodal reasoning by 3.3\% over full-image generation. Trained with StructCoT and large-scale multimodal data, DeltaV-2B further outperforms substantially larger open-source models by 8.4\% on in-domain multimodal reasoning evaluations and surpasses the comparable-scale Qwen3-VL-2B by 5.9\% on external multimodal reasoning and understanding benchmarks. Code, models, and StructCoT will be released at https://github.com/Pengjie-W/DeltaV.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 8

DeltaTTG: Training Multi-Turn Agents with a Token-to-Go Progress Meter

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for multi-turn agents relies on sparse terminal rewards that say little about individual steps. Within-group step comparisons depend on reliable state matching and sufficiently diverse sampled outcomes, while direct step scoring may require costly external evaluators, human annotations, or task-specific heuristics. We introduce DeltaTTG to learn a reusable progress signal through a shared progress meter, using low-cost supervision from diverse policies' recorded trajectories without task-specific progress rules. Its supervision target, Token-to-Go (TTG), the number of tokens remaining to be generated until task completion, serves as an observable proxy for remaining completion effort. During actor training, changes in the frozen meter's estimates redistribute outcome-derived advantages across steps without altering the reward, preserving each trajectory's advantage sign and token-average scale. On ALFWorld, PaperSearchQA, and BFCLv3, DeltaTTG improves the average score over GRPO by 5.7 and 7.2 points with Qwen3-4B and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, respectively, outperforms all compared RL baselines on average, and keeps actor-training GPU-hours close to GRPO. Further experiments show improved sample efficiency and out-of-domain performance, and support the meter's ability to distinguish step quality and guide test-time action selection across actor sizes. The code is available at https://github.com/Xuyan923r/DeltaTTG.

The Delta Learning Hypothesis: Preference Tuning on Weak Data can Yield Strong Gains

Improvements in language models are often driven by improving the quality of the data we train them on, which can be limiting when strong supervision is scarce. In this work, we show that paired preference data consisting of individually weak data points can enable gains beyond the strength of each individual data point. We formulate the delta learning hypothesis to explain this phenomenon, positing that the relative quality delta between points suffices to drive learning via preference tuning--even when supervised finetuning on the weak data hurts. We validate our hypothesis in controlled experiments and at scale, where we post-train 8B models on preference data generated by pairing a small 3B model's responses with outputs from an even smaller 1.5B model to create a meaningful delta. Strikingly, on a standard 11-benchmark evaluation suite (MATH, MMLU, etc.), our simple recipe matches the performance of Tulu 3, a state-of-the-art open model tuned from the same base model while relying on much stronger supervisors (e.g., GPT-4o). Thus, delta learning enables simpler and cheaper open recipes for state-of-the-art post-training. To better understand delta learning, we prove in logistic regression that the performance gap between two weak teacher models provides useful signal for improving a stronger student. Overall, our work shows that models can learn surprisingly well from paired data that might typically be considered weak.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025

OSDN: Improving Delta Rule with Provable Online Preconditioning in Linear Attention

Linear attention and state-space models offer constant-memory alternatives to softmax attention, but often struggle with in-context associative recall. The Delta Rule mitigates this by writing each token via one step of online gradient descent. However, its step size relies on a single scalar gate that ignores the feature-wise curvature of the inner objective. We propose Online Scaled DeltaNet (OSDN), which augments the scalar gate with a diagonal preconditioner updated online via hypergradient feedback. Crucially, this right-preconditioning is algebraically equivalent to a per-feature scaling of the write-side key. This equivalence allows OSDN to strictly preserve the hardware-friendly chunkwise parallel pipeline of DeltaNet without incurring high-dimensional state overhead. Theoretically, by exploiting the exact-quadratic structure of the inner regression loss, we establish super-geometric convergence against a right-Newton comparator and prove an algorithm-aligned token-local residual contraction bound. To handle non-stationary contexts, we further introduce Adaptive Preconditioner Forgetting (APF) to dynamically refresh stale calibration. Empirically, OSDN demonstrates strong performance across scales. At the 340M-parameter scale, OSDN improves JRT-style in-context recall by 32% over DeltaNet. Scaling to 1.3B parameters, it achieves a 39% reduction in the recall residual ratio while maintaining parity on general downstream tasks (e.g., perplexity and LongBench) -- demonstrating that our online-preconditioning mechanism effectively transfers and amplifies at the billion-parameter scale.

  • 6 authors
·
May 12

Kronecker Delta Rule for Long Context Linear Attention

We propose KronLSTM, a linear attention architecture based on the Kronecker Delta Rule, a novel update rule for associative matrix memories. KronLSTM extends the xLSTM family with a memory-revision mechanism that corrects targeted associations while modifying the memory only along a single direction in matrix space. This minimally invasive memory revision reduces interference with previously stored information compared with delta-rule updates, making it particularly well suited for long-context language modeling. The resulting memory dynamics can be mathematically described as a Markov chain that converges to a steady-state distribution, while the expected norm of the memory matrix remains uniformly bounded throughout the entire input sequence. Hence, KronLSTM ensures stable memory dynamics without requiring additional normalization and stabilization mechanisms for the memory state. Experiments show that KronLSTM is competitive with, and often outperforms, existing linear attention architectures, including models of the (Gated) DeltaNet family, with particularly strong performance on long context benchmarks. These results establish the Kronecker Delta Rule as an effective and analytically tractable foundation for stable associative memory in recurrent linear attention architectures. Our code (https://github.com/NX-AI/KronLSTM) and models (https://huggingface.co/collections/NX-AI/kronlstm) are open-source.

NX-AI NX-AI
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Oct 18 2

Harness-Delta Attribution: Dissecting Gains From Harness Evolution

Harness evolution automatically optimizes the prompts, skills, tools, and orchestration code around a fixed-weight model, offering a way to improve agentic systems without updating model weights. The agent harness is iteratively optimized to achieve higher performance on the search set. But how much of this gain reflects benchmark-specific overfitting or additional inference-time compute, and how much may generalize beyond the search set? In this work, we introduce Harness-Delta Attribution (HDA), an evaluation protocol that dissects an evolution gain into artifact-driven overfitting, gains explained by test-time scaling, and the remainder, which gives an upper bound on residual generalizable improvement. We apply HDA to 11 executor models and three harness-evolution frameworks across math, coding, creativity, and agentic tasks. In 21 of these settings that show statistically significant search-set gains, we find that a large share of the improvement is explained by overfitting or test-time scaling. Specifically, among these 21 settings, overfitting and test-time scaling account for 54% and 14% of the gain on average; their combined share exceeds 50% in 14 settings. The residual and held-out transfer vary substantially across tasks, models, and frameworks. Importantly, search-set gains often fail to transfer to held-out tasks, and provide limited evidence that they will persist under practical distribution shifts. Moreover, validation-based signals are insufficient to prevent overfitting. These results motivate attribution-aware evaluation in future harness evolution research.

  • 8 authors
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Oct 14 2

Thinking with Deltas: Incentivizing Reinforcement Learning via Differential Visual Reasoning Policy

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models. However, adapting RLVR to multimodal domains suffers from a critical perception-reasoning decoupling. Existing paradigms, driven by text-centric outcome rewards, reasoning in language medium, inadvertently encourage models to bypass visual perception. We empirically validate this through blind experiments: state-of-the-art policies maintain or surprisingly improve performance even when visual inputs are entirely removed. This reveals that these models degenerate into blind reasoners, exploiting linguistic priors to generate plausible answers instead of attending to visual evidence. In response, we propose Thinking with Deltas, a framework driven by a Differential Visual Reasoning Policy (DVRP). DVRP introduces intrinsic supervision via visual triplets, comprising original, masked, and perturbed inputs. It optimizes the model to maximize reasoning divergence from masked inputs (enforcing visual sensitivity) while minimizing divergence from perturbed inputs (ensuring visual robustness). By aligning reasoning variations strictly with the Delta of visual information, DVRP inherently bolsters visual understanding capabilities and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both general and medical benchmarks, without requiring external annotations or auxiliary tools.

  • 5 authors
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Jan 11

A Multi-fidelity Double-Delta Wing Dataset and Empirical Scaling Laws for GNN-based Aerodynamic Field Surrogate

Data-driven surrogate models are increasingly adopted to accelerate vehicle design. However, open-source multi-fidelity datasets and empirical guidelines linking dataset size to model performance remain limited. This study investigates the relationship between training data size and prediction accuracy for a graph neural network (GNN) based surrogate model for aerodynamic field prediction. We release an open-source, multi-fidelity aerodynamic dataset for double-delta wings, comprising 2448 flow snapshots across 272 geometries evaluated at angles of attack from 11 (degree) to 19 (degree) at Ma=0.3 using both Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) and Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solvers. The geometries are generated using a nested Saltelli sampling scheme to support future dataset expansion and variance-based sensitivity analysis. Using this dataset, we conduct a preliminary empirical scaling study of the MF-VortexNet surrogate by constructing six training datasets with sizes ranging from 40 to 1280 snapshots and training models with 0.1 to 2.4 million parameters under a fixed training budget. We find that the test error decreases with data size with a power-law exponent of -0.6122, indicating efficient data utilization. Based on this scaling law, we estimate that the optimal sampling density is approximately eight samples per dimension in a d-dimensional design space. The results also suggest improved data utilization efficiency for larger surrogate models, implying a potential trade-off between dataset generation cost and model training budget.

  • 2 authors
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Dec 23, 2025

Why Gated DeltaNet Survives 4-Bit Quantization: NVFP4 W4A4 for the Recurrent Half of a Hybrid 27B LLM

Hybrid LLMs pair softmax attention with linear-attention layers such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN), whose recurrent state summarizes the context in fixed size. Early community 4-bit quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B (48 GDN layers, 16 attention layers) left the GDN block in 8- or 16-bit precision -- especially its decay and write-strength gates -- on the intuition that errors in a recurrence accumulate over long contexts. We test that intuition by building Minima: NVFP4 W4A4 on all 496 linear layers, GDN included. Across perplexity at 4K/32K, MMLU-Pro, GSM8K, AIME'25, GPQA-Diamond, LiveCodeBench, and RULER retrieval to 64K, Minima matches BF16 within seed noise (5-task average -0.52) while being the smallest (17.5 GiB) and fastest-prefill (+14-19%) recipe we compare, and its 32K perplexity gap shrinks with position. A four-part mechanism study explains why: (i) NVFP4's 16-element block scaling localizes the residual stream's extreme outliers, equalizing activation error across layer roles; (ii) the supposedly fragile gate projections are the least sensitive -- softplus/exponential and sigmoid parameterizations compress ~11% GEMM error to ~2% output error; (iii) the delta-rule recurrence holds injected noise at a flat plateau over 32K tokens and forgets a state impulse within hundreds of steps, because each write overwrites the state along the current key direction; (iv) the per-token quantization cost washes out with context instead of compounding. We also repair a global-scale mismatch that arises when per-module-calibrated NVFP4 checkpoints are served by kernels that fuse those modules into one GEMM, and show calibrated FP8 KV-cache scales are performance-free. The result: a practical recipe -- quantize everything, ship KV scales -- and a mechanistic account of why the recurrent half of a hybrid LLM is the easy half to quantize. Checkpoint: https://huggingface.co/minima-ai/mnma_qwen3.8_27b_nvfp4

minima-ai Minima AI
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Sep 2 2

Complex KDA: Understanding and Enhancing the Expressivity of Kimi Delta Attention

Linear RNNs based on the delta-rule enable efficient sequence modeling, but their linear updates with a low-rank correction constrain their expressivity. Prior work has shown that composing two delta-rule transitions in a single recurrent update can model a 2D rotation, but this increases the rank and the cost of the updates compared to a single transition. We show that Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) can realize 2D rotations by combining a single delta-rule transformation with a second reflection supplied by its channel-wise gate. This requires extending the parameter ranges of KDA by combining two existing range extensions: allowing gates in [-1,1] and the delta-rule coefficient β in [0,2]. We call the resulting model Complex KDA (CKDA). It preserves KDA's stability and efficiency, with transitions that remain diagonal-plus-rank-one and non-expansive, while reaching the state-tracking expressivity of DeltaProduct_2. We characterize the expressivity of CKDA and prove that every orthogonal diagonal-plus-rank-one matrix is exactly a CKDA transition matrix. A single CKDA layer can track every finite group isomorphic to a subgroup of SO(3), and many state-tracking results use one fewer layer for CKDA compared to other diagonal-plus-rank-one Linear RNNs. Empirically, combining both extensions yields the strongest length extrapolation among tested KDA range settings on S_3, S_4, and periodic audio continuation. In language modeling, CKDA outperforms Transformers and other linear RNNs, obtains similar results to a KDA baseline, and shows promising scaling behavior. Our code is open source at https://github.com/OpenEuroLLM/ComplexKDA and our models are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/openeurollm/complexkda.

openeurollm OpenEuroLLM
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Sep 20 2

NeMo-DCR: Bit-Exact Delta-Compressed Refit for Scalable Agentic RL at Trillion-Parameter Scale

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) disaggregates training from rollout, so each policy update must reach the rollout clusters before the next batch. Transferring a full 1T checkpoint for such weight synchronization (refit) takes 87.5 min between two AWS regions. Measurements of BF16 training show that about 1% of weights change their stored values per step. Recent systems exploit this sparsity but fall short on placement, exactness, or efficiency: they reimplement placement rules, assemble full tensors, rebuild values arithmetically, or use a cross-cluster collective, and none fully recovers from mid-refit failures. We present NeMo-DCR (Delta-Compressed Refit), which sends only changes yet is bit-exact: receivers obtain the same parameter and buffer bits as a dense refit. For placement, fixed affine mappings project changes from training shards into the checkpoint's canonical coordinates, residual conversion covers the other changes, and the serving runtime's native loader places all changes in receiver storage. For exactness, compressible XOR masks carry affine changes whose projection and loader preserve stored bits, and overwrites carry the others. Receivers apply both in place, retries overwrite partial writes, and a joint commit binds the policy to the baseline for the next delta. For efficiency, object storage or a relay tree streams payloads during delta construction, without a cross-cluster collective. Even at 3% and 5% change rates, NeMo-DCR refits of 30B-1T models are 12-40times faster than a transport-only full-checkpoint reference. A 1T relay-tree refit at 3% takes 150 s instead of 87.5 min, making refits practical for cross-cluster agentic RL at trillion-parameter scale.

nvidia NVIDIA
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Oct 5 2