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Beyond Inference-Only Deployment: Comparing Weight-Based Consolidation Against Cascading Compaction

arXiv:2605.24657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Major LLM platforms deploy models in an inference-only configuration: the model serves requests but never updates per-user weights. Users must repeatedly re-teach preferences, corrections, and project context, and context-based workarounds consume context-window space and degrade under cascading compaction. We evaluate an alternative: nightly consolidation of interaction knowledge into model weights via reflection, synthesis, and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning on a single consumer GPU. Across ten realistic software development conversations (n = 10, 1,146 test questions across three memory types), three cycles of cascading compaction retain 36.8 +/- 3.0% of knowledge (between an 11.8% no-context floor and a 90.1% full-context ceiling), while consolidation retains 80.4 +/- 1.3% -- a 43.6 pp gain (paired t(9) = 14.8, p 74.6%) and episodic project facts (31.5% -> 78.2%). As a methodological aside, mean per-token validation cross-entropy is negatively correlated with LLM-judged accuracy (r = -0.51) while median per-token validation cross-entropy tracks accuracy almost exactly (r = +0.99): under evaluators that tolerate surface-form variation, the mean is misleading and a heavy-tail-robust statistic is the faithful signal. Persistent personalization requires moving beyond inference-only deployment toward architectures that consolidate knowledge into weights.
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When Mean CE Fails: Median CE Can Better Track Language Model Quality

arXiv:2605.24667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mean cross-entropy is the standard validation metric for language models, but it can fail to track model quality during training. We examine this in two common scenarios. First, in Qwen2.5-1.5B SFT on synthetic fact-learning, we find that mean CE rises substantially after the initial learning phase while held-out fact-recall accuracy remains near its peak. Second, we find that in top-K distillation on TinyStories, decreasing K improves median CE while worsening mean CE; the Top-5 student attains the highest LLM-judge score and crosses below its teacher on median CE, despite having the worst mean CE. In both cases, median CE correlates much more closely with task performance than does mean CE. Analyzing how bulk and tail percentile CE move during training reveals that training reshapes the empirical per-token CE distribution. In top-K distillation, smaller K yields a distribution with more mass at both extremes, decreasing the median and increasing the mean. In Qwen SFT, the bulk saturates quickly while the tail extends in the latter half of training. In both, the task-evaluation metric appears more sensitive to the bulk than to the tail. Practically, we recommend reporting a small set of percentile CE summaries alongside the mean, and using concordance among them as a tool to keep track of distribution reshaping, as well as a low-cost diagnostic for when mean and median CE disagree on model selection.
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An activated wheat CCG10-NLR immune receptor forms an octameric resistosome

An activated CCG10-NLR WAI3 plant immune receptor forms an octameric resistosome, which induces calcium influx and immune responses through a unique channel architecture.
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