Yonatan Geifman

Guy Bar-Shalom, Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv

To deploy and operate deep neural models in production, the quality of their predictions, which might be contaminated benignly or manipulated maliciously by input distributional deviations, must be monitored and assessed. Specifically, we study the case of monitoring the healthy operation of a deep neural network (DNN) receiving a stream of data, with the aim of detecting input distributional deviations over which the quality of the network's predictions is potentially damaged. Using selective prediction principles, we propose a distribution deviation detection method for DNNs. The proposed method is derived from a tight coverage generalization bound computed over a sample of instances drawn from the true underlying distribution. Based on this bound, our detector continuously monitors the operation of the network out-of-sample over a test window and fires off an alarm whenever a deviation is detected. Our novel detection method performs on-par or better than the state-of-the-art, while consuming substantially lower computation time (five orders of magnitude reduction) and space complexities. Unlike previous methods, which require at least linear dependence on the size of the source distribution for each detection, rendering them inapplicable to ``Google-Scale'' datasets, our approach eliminates this dependence, making it suitable for real-world applications.

Ali Taghibakhshi, Ruisi Cai, Saurav Muralidharan et al.

Training a family of large language models (LLMs), either from scratch or via iterative compression, is prohibitively expensive and inefficient, requiring separate training runs for each model in the family. In this paper, we introduce Star Elastic, a novel LLM post-training method that adds N nested submodels to a given parent reasoning model using the compute of one run (N-fold savings) via a single post-training job. Beyond reducing training costs, Star Elastic also addresses a fundamental limitation of efficient reasoning: the rigidity of static architectures, which forces the allocation of constant resources regardless of token difficulty. By unlocking elastic budget control, Star Elastic enables a novel inference scheme that uses different submodels for each reasoning phase (thinking and answering). Star Elastic supports (1) nesting along the SSM, embedding channel, MoE, and FFN axes, (2) learning nested submodels via an end-to-end trainable router, and (3) curriculum-based knowledge distillation. Building on the Nemotron Elastic framework, we apply Star Elastic to the NVIDIA Nemotron Nano models, with a particular focus on hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures: from Nemotron Nano v3 (30B/3.6A), we generate 23B (2.8A) and 12B (2.0A) variants with 160B training tokens. All nested models match or outperform independently trained baselines of comparable size and achieve a 360x reduction versus pretraining from scratch and a 7x reduction over state-of-the-art compression. Crucially, elastic budget control advances the accuracy-latency Pareto frontier, achieving up to 16% higher accuracy and 1.9x lower latency via dynamic per-phase model selection. We further extend Star Elastic to quantized regimes via Quantization-Aware Distillation (QAD), producing nested NVFP4 and FP8 elastic checkpoints that preserve zero-shot slicing while delivering smaller deployment footprints.

Akhiad Bercovich, Nir Ailon, Vladimir Anisimov et al.

Reasoning-focused LLMs improve answer quality by generating longer reasoning traces, but the additional tokens dramatically increase serving cost, motivating inference optimization. We extend and apply Puzzle, a post-training neural architecture search (NAS) framework, to gpt-oss-120B to produce gpt-oss-puzzle-88B, a deployment-optimized derivative. Our approach combines heterogeneous MoE expert pruning, selective replacement of full-context attention with window attention, FP8 KV-cache quantization with calibrated scales, and post-training reinforcement learning to recover accuracy, while maintaining low generation length. In terms of per-token speeds, on an 8XH100 node we achieve 1.63X and 1.22X throughput speedups in long-context and short-context settings, respectively. gpt-oss-puzzle-88B also delivers throughput speedups of 2.82X on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU. However, because token counts can change with reasoning effort and model variants, per-token throughput (tok/s) and latency (ms/token) do not necessarily lead to end-to-end speedups: a 2X throughput gain is erased if traces grow 2X. Conversely, throughput gains can be spent on more reasoning tokens to improve accuracy; we therefore advocate request-level efficiency metrics that normalize throughput by tokens generated and trace an accuracy--speed frontier across reasoning efforts. We show that gpt-oss-puzzle-88B improves over gpt-oss-120B along the entire frontier, delivering up to 1.29X higher request-level efficiency. Across various benchmarks, gpt-oss-puzzle-88B matches or slightly exceeds the parent on suite-average accuracy across reasoning efforts, with retention ranging from 100.8% (high) to 108.2% (low), showing that post-training architecture search can substantially reduce inference costs without sacrificing quality.

Akhiad Bercovich, Talor Abramovich, Daniel Afrimi et al.

We present Nemotron-Labs-3-Puzzle-75B-A9B, a compressed variant of Nemotron-3-Super optimized for interactive deployment. We designed the model to maximize server throughput under high user throughput constraints. In interactive serving workloads on a single 8xB200 node, Puzzle-75B-A9B achieves approximately 2x higher server throughput than Nemotron-3-Super at matched user throughput constraints. In ultra-long-context deployment on a single H100 GPU, the compressed model increases 1M-token concurrency from 1 request to 8 requests. Puzzle-75B-A9B is constructed using a multi-stage pipeline that combines the Iterative Puzzle compression framework with knowledge distillation, reinforcement learning, quantization, and a Multi-Token Prediction head. The compression process jointly optimizes heterogeneous MoE pruning, active parameter budget, and Mamba pruning to improve inference efficiency while preserving model quality. We evaluate Puzzle-75B-A9B on a broad suite of reasoning, coding, multilingual, long-context, and agentic benchmarks. Despite substantial compression, the model retains strong downstream accuracy relative to the parent model across a wide range of tasks. These results demonstrate that large hybrid MoE models can be substantially optimized for deployment efficiency while maintaining strong downstream capability.

Akhiad Bercovich, Tomer Ronen, Talor Abramovich et al. · nvidia

Large language models (LLMs) offer remarkable capabilities, yet their high inference costs restrict wider adoption. While increasing parameter counts improves accuracy, it also broadens the gap between state-of-the-art capabilities and practical deployability. We present Puzzle, a hardware-aware framework that accelerates the inference of LLMs while preserving their capabilities. Using neural architecture search (NAS) at a large-scale, Puzzle optimizes models with tens of billions of parameters. Our approach utilizes blockwise local knowledge distillation (BLD) for parallel architecture exploration and employs mixed-integer programming for precise constraint optimization. We showcase our framework's impact via Llama-3.1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct (Nemotron-51B) and Llama-3.3-Nemotron-49B, two publicly available models derived from Llama-70B-Instruct. Both models achieve a 2.17x inference throughput speedup, fitting on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU while retaining 98.4% of the original model's benchmark accuracies. These are the most accurate models supporting single H100 GPU inference with large batch sizes, despite training on 45B tokens at most, far fewer than the 15T used to train Llama-70B. Lastly, we show that lightweight alignment on these derived models allows them to surpass the parent model in specific capabilities. Our work establishes that powerful LLM models can be optimized for efficient deployment with only negligible loss in quality, underscoring that inference performance, not parameter count alone, should guide model selection.

Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv

We consider the problem of selective prediction (also known as reject option) in deep neural networks, and introduce SelectiveNet, a deep neural architecture with an integrated reject option. Existing rejection mechanisms are based mostly on a threshold over the prediction confidence of a pre-trained network. In contrast, SelectiveNet is trained to optimize both classification (or regression) and rejection simultaneously, end-to-end. The result is a deep neural network that is optimized over the covered domain. In our experiments, we show a consistently improved risk-coverage trade-off over several well-known classification and regression datasets, thus reaching new state-of-the-art results for deep selective classification.

Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv

We consider active learning of deep neural networks. Most active learning works in this context have focused on studying effective querying mechanisms and assumed that an appropriate network architecture is a priori known for the problem at hand. We challenge this assumption and propose a novel active strategy whereby the learning algorithm searches for effective architectures on the fly, while actively learning. We apply our strategy using three known querying techniques (softmax response, MC-dropout, and coresets) and show that the proposed approach overwhelmingly outperforms active learning using fixed architectures.

Yonatan Geifman, Guy Uziel, Ran El-Yaniv

We consider the problem of uncertainty estimation in the context of (non-Bayesian) deep neural classification. In this context, all known methods are based on extracting uncertainty signals from a trained network optimized to solve the classification problem at hand. We demonstrate that such techniques tend to introduce biased estimates for instances whose predictions are supposed to be highly confident. We argue that this deficiency is an artifact of the dynamics of training with SGD-like optimizers, and it has some properties similar to overfitting. Based on this observation, we develop an uncertainty estimation algorithm that selectively estimates the uncertainty of highly confident points, using earlier snapshots of the trained model, before their estimates are jittered (and way before they are ready for actual classification). We present extensive experiments indicating that the proposed algorithm provides uncertainty estimates that are consistently better than all known methods.

Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv

This paper is concerned with pool-based active learning for deep neural networks. Motivated by coreset dataset compression ideas, we present a novel active learning algorithm that queries consecutive points from the pool using farthest-first traversals in the space of neural activation over a representation layer. We show consistent and overwhelming improvement in sample complexity over passive learning (random sampling) for three datasets: MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. In addition, our algorithm outperforms the traditional uncertainty sampling technique (obtained using softmax activations), and we identify cases where uncertainty sampling is only slightly better than random sampling.

Yonatan Geifman, Ran El-Yaniv

Selective classification techniques (also known as reject option) have not yet been considered in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs). These techniques can potentially significantly improve DNNs prediction performance by trading-off coverage. In this paper we propose a method to construct a selective classifier given a trained neural network. Our method allows a user to set a desired risk level. At test time, the classifier rejects instances as needed, to grant the desired risk (with high probability). Empirical results over CIFAR and ImageNet convincingly demonstrate the viability of our method, which opens up possibilities to operate DNNs in mission-critical applications. For example, using our method an unprecedented 2% error in top-5 ImageNet classification can be guaranteed with probability 99.9%, and almost 60% test coverage.

Ran El-Yaniv, Yonatan Geifman, Yair Wiener

We introduce the Prediction Advantage (PA), a novel performance measure for prediction functions under any loss function (e.g., classification or regression). The PA is defined as the performance advantage relative to the Bayesian risk restricted to knowing only the distribution of the labels. We derive the PA for well-known loss functions, including 0/1 loss, cross-entropy loss, absolute loss, and squared loss. In the latter case, the PA is identical to the well-known R-squared measure, widely used in statistics. The use of the PA ensures meaningful quantification of prediction performance, which is not guaranteed, for example, when dealing with noisy imbalanced classification problems. We argue that among several known alternative performance measures, PA is the best (and only) quantity ensuring meaningfulness for all noise and imbalance levels.