Pretraining A Large Language Model using Distributed GPUs: A Memory-Efficient Decentralized ParadigmJinrui Zhang, Chaodong Xiao, Aoqi Wu et al.
Pretraining large language models (LLMs) typically requires centralized clusters with thousands of high-memory GPUs (e.g., H100/A100). Recent decentralized training methods reduce communication overhead by employing federated optimization; however, they still need to train the entire model on each node, remaining constrained by GPU memory limitations. In this work, we propose SParse Expert Synchronization (SPES), a memory-efficient decentralized framework for pretraining mixture-of-experts (MoE) LLMs. SPES trains only a subset of experts per node, substantially lowering the memory footprint. Each node updates its local experts and periodically synchronizes with other nodes, eliminating full-parameter transmission while ensuring efficient knowledge sharing. To accelerate convergence, we introduce an expert-merging warm-up strategy, where experts exchange knowledge early in training, to rapidly establish foundational capabilities. With SPES, we train a 2B-parameter MoE LLM using 16 standalone 48GB GPUs over internet connections, which achieves competitive performance with centrally trained LLMs under similar computational budgets. We further demonstrate scalability by training a 7B model from scratch and a 9B model upcycled from a dense checkpoint, both of which match prior centralized baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjr2000/SPES.
2.2ROJan 30
Mitigating Error Accumulation in Continuous Navigation via Memory-Augmented Kalman FilteringYin Tang, Jiawei Ma, Jinrui Zhang et al.
Continuous navigation in complex environments is critical for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). However, the existing Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) models follow the dead-reckoning, which iteratively updates its position for the next waypoint prediction, and subsequently construct the complete trajectory. Then, such stepwise manner will inevitably lead to accumulated errors of position over time, resulting in misalignment between internal belief and objective coordinates, which is known as "state drift" and ultimately compromises the full trajectory prediction. Drawing inspiration from classical control theory, we propose to correct for errors by formulating such sequential prediction as a recursive Bayesian state estimation problem. In this paper, we design NeuroKalman, a novel framework that decouples navigation into two complementary processes: a Prior Prediction, based on motion dynamics and a Likelihood Correction, from historical observation. We first mathematically associate Kernel Density Estimation of the measurement likelihood with the attention-based retrieval mechanism, which then allows the system to rectify the latent representation using retrieved historical anchors without gradient updates. Comprehensive experiments on TravelUAV benchmark demonstrate that, with only 10% of the training data fine-tuning, our method clearly outperforms strong baselines and regulates drift accumulation.