Schmidhuber'd

If they didn't cite your paper that's bullshit.

But if they read your paper enough that they invited you to a talk, that probably means they were far enough along to independently inventing it they were going to do so anyway, and wanted to chat with someone who was also doing the thing they were already doing. Good ideas tend to reveal themselves to anyone who is aware of the problem.

Pardon my simplistic question, but when you mean rotation you’re essentially talking about diagonalization aren’t you?

So storing the diagonal as a matrix and the new bases is more compact?

I just today learned about Multi-Head Latent Attention, which is also sort of a way of compressing the KV cache. Can someone explain how this new development relates to MHLA?

They are saying that models should be invariant to data's orientation - and only sensitive to the distance between vectors. This has a pretty significant effect on reducing the set of possible models, and may stabilize the optimization.

In simple terms, large ML models like LLMs often learn trivial rules such as "if the 21st decimal place of the 5th dimension in the embedding vector is 5 - then the image is of a cat." Learning such a memorization function is usually not what we are trying to do, and there are a variety of techniques to avoid these trivial solutions and "smooth" the optimization geometry.

They are not doing random rotation, simplification here means they are aligning the outliers. If you threw a bunch of shapes on the ground they are picking up one that rolled away and putting it with the others.

>How can a boolean value preserve all of the relational and positional information between data points?

They aren't reducing entire vector to a bollean only each of its dimensions.

For some reason I thought the implementation would be way more complicated than that. I obviously lack the domain knowledge to tackle something like this, but it looks straight forward.

It is AI generated. Or was written by someone a bit far from the technical advances IMHO. The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma is a very specific and powerful concept, when in the article the QLJ explanation is vacuous. A knowledgeable human would not have left the reader wanting for how that relates to the Lemma.

I think it is though-

“ TurboQuant, QJL, and PolarQuant are more than just practical engineering solutions; they’re fundamental algorithmic contributions backed by strong theoretical proofs. These methods don't just work well in real-world applications; they are provably efficient and operate near theoretical lower bounds.”

I can assure you OpenAI and Anthropic pay for hardware. They don’t receive it for free.

If you think of it from the point of view of the universal approximation theorem, it's all efficiency optimisation. We know that it works if we do it incredibly inefficiently.

Every architecture improvement is essentially a way to achieve the capability of a single fully-connected hidden layer network n wide. With fewer parameters.

Given these architectures usually still contain fully connected layers, unless they've done something really wrong, they should still be able to do anything if you make the entire thing large enough.

That means a large enough [insert model architecture] will be able to approximate any function to arbitrary precision. As long as the efficiency gains with the architecture are retained as the scale increases they should be able to get there quicker.

Most breakthroughs that are published are for efficiency because most breakthroughs that are published are for open source.'

All the foundation model breakthroughs are hoarded by the labs doing the pretraining. That being said, RL reasoning training is the obvious and largest breakthrough for intelligence in recent years.

Efficiency gains can be used to make existing models more profitable, or to make new larger and more intelligent models.

LLM slop. See their other comment which is even more obvious.

KV cache compression, so how much memory the model needs to use for extending its context. Does not affect the weight size.

https://mesuvash.github.io/blog/2026/turboquant-interactive/ has a little visualisation

1. Efficient recursive transform of kv embeddings into polar coordinates 2. Quantize resulting angles without the need for explicit normalization. This saves memory via key insight: angles follow a distribution and have analytical form.

The way I understand it, it's a way of compressing vectors by switching from their per-component representation to polar coordinates representation, where the nearby vectors are clumped together to a single line, allowing to describe them by different lengths

Is the number of bits per coordinate. So, 1 bit is 2x2 grid. 3 bit is a 64 cell grid (2^3 x 2^3). Here you have a demo.

https://mesuvash.github.io/blog/2026/turboquant-interactive/

The explanation is terrible, but it's clear that it's not actually lossless.

These are very different media types with very different goals.

Agreed. The practical implications are often more interesting than the math anyway — smaller models running locally means you can afford to run multiple models in parallel for cross-validation, which changes how you approach tasks like code analysis or bug detection.

If in short, for many inference tasks the bottleneck is memory bandwidth. Suppose you have a machine with a memory bandwidth of 256 GB/s, and let's say you want to do inference for 4B model (model with 4 billion parameters). If you will load the model in BF16 format (16 bits), each forward pass (i.e. each token generated) will require roughly ~8 GB of memory bandwidth. So, 256/8 = 32 t/s, and that's the generation speed you will be strictly capped at even if your processing power is measured in exaFLOPS. But let's say now that you have decided to instead quantize the model and then run the quantized version. Suppose you have made a Q4_K_M version (4 bits + some weights will take more). Now each of your forward passes will take roughly 2-3 GB (rough approximations, reality is different) of memory bandwith (actually, it will be around 2 GB), and even in the worst case 256/3 = 85.3, while 256/2 = 128 t/s. Quants can reduce quality of the model and lower it's performance, but in most modern quantization methods those losses are usually negligible (although, of course, they're still present). So, as you can see, it can be concluded that quantization "widens" (it's not removing it fully) memory bottleneck while still preserving (not always though) acceptable quality.

(Sorry for my terrible English, it's not my native language)

So let’s start with a really simple decoder transformer with a single layer and single attention head, and train it to predict the next token in a sequence of text. To predict the next token you need a few things: a query for the very last token in the sequence, and a key and value for every prior token. You take your query and compute a dot product with every prior key (two large vectors in, scaler attention score out). That scaler attention score first goes through softmax, and then becomes the weight you use to compute a weighted average of your values, new value goes through the mlp, mlp output is projected into the logits from which you sample your next token (that’s the general idea at least skipped a few steps).

The last query in the sequence will be new for every new token you predict, but the set of prior keys and values stay the same, ie keys and values are reusable. The key value cache gets bigger and bigger for each new token you add to the sequence, and that’s where compression comes in. You have to store the keys and values in vram, and you’d like to keep the size down by not storing the raw uncompressed tensors. To make this work well your compression needs two things: it needs to be fast so that you can compress and decompress on the fly, and it needs to play well with softmax attention. Prior attempts at compression usually suck at one or the other, either the speed to decompress is too slow and your token/s takes a hit, or you lose important precision and the model output quality suffers. The claim in the paper is that they’ve made progress on both.

r is a single value per vector. You don't have to quantize it, you can keep it and quantize the billion+ other coordinates of the vector.

Nah, those are completely different beasts. DeepSeek's MLA solves the KV cache issue via low-rank projection - they literally squeeze the matrix through a latent vector at train time. TurboQuant is just Post-Training Quantization where they mathematically compress existing weights and activations using polar coordinates

Efficient execution on the GPU appears to have been one of the specific aims of the authors. Table 2 of their paper shows real world performance that would appear at a glance to be compatible with inference.

Apparently MLX confirmed it - https://x.com/prince_canuma/status/2036611007523512397

Classic academic move. If the authors show accuracy-vs-space charts but hide end-to-end latency, it usually means their code is slower in practice than vanilla fp16 without any compression. Polar coordinates are absolute poison for parallel GPU compute