Samet Oymak
Famous AuthorPublications
Stochastic Sparse Attention for Memory-Bound Inference
Autoregressive decoding becomes bandwidth-limited at long contexts, as generating each token requires reading all $n_k$ key and value vectors from KV cache. We present Stochastic Additive No-mulT Attention (SANTA), a method that sparsifies value-cache access by sampling $S \ll n_k$ indices from the post-softmax distribution and aggregates only those value rows. This yields an unbiased estimator of the post-softmax value aggregation while replacing value-stage multiply-accumulates with gather-and-add. We introduce stratified sampling to design variance-reduced, GPU-friendly variants, demonstrating $1.5\times$ decode-step attention kernel speedup over FlashInfer and FlashDecoding on an NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada while matching baseline accuracy at 32k-token contexts. Finally, we propose Bernoulli $qK^\mathsf{T}$ sampling as a complementary technique to sparsify the score stage, reducing key-feature access through stochastic ternary queries. Both methods are orthogonal to upstream techniques such as ternary quantization, low-rank projections, and KV-cache compression. Together, they point toward sparse, multiplier-free, and energy-efficient inference. We open-source our kernels at: https://github.com/OPUSLab/SANTA.git
Learning to Correct: Calibrated Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Attempt Chain-of-Thought
State-of-the-art reasoning models utilize long chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve increasingly complex problems using more test-time computation. In this work, we explore a long CoT setting where the model makes up to K successive attempts at solving a problem, in which each attempt is allowed to build on earlier ones after the model receives a hard verifier feedback. This motivates RL methods that can harness per-attempt rewards by carefully weighting individual attempts. We study optimizing the Verification@K reward (the model succeeds by the K-th attempt) and show that naively weighing the attempts by their pass/fail results in biased gradients. We introduce Calibrated Attempt-Level (CAL) GRPO by devising a weighing strategy to obtain unbiased gradients while maintaining small variance. Our theory reveals how incorporating per-attempt rewards influence the training and the eventual Verification@K performance. Experiments, baselines, and ablations on synthetic and real data corroborate our theory and the benefits of CAL-GRPO over vanilla GRPO as well as naive weighting.
In-Context Learning Under Regime Change
Non-stationary sequences arise naturally in control, forecasting, and decision-making. The data-generating process shifts at unknown times, and models must detect the change, discard or downweight obsolete evidence, and adapt to new dynamics on the fly. Transformer-based foundation models increasingly rely on in-context learning for time series forecasting, tabular prediction, and continuous control. As these models are deployed in non-stationary environments, understanding their ability to detect and adapt to regime shifts is important. We formalize this as an in-context change-point detection problem and formally establish the existence of transformer models that solve this problem. Our construction demonstrates that model complexity, in layers and parameters, depends on the level of information available about the change-point location, from no knowledge to knowing exact timing. We validate our results with experiments on synthetic linear regression and linear dynamical systems, where trained transformers match the performance of optimal baselines across information levels. We also show that encoding and incorporating changepoint knowledge indeed improves the real-world performance of a pretrained foundation models on infectious disease forecasting and on financial volatility forecasting around Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) announcements without retraining, demonstrating practical applicability to real-world regime changes.