We write and maintain tinygrad, the fastest growing neural network framework
Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks
Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) is a novel approach using two small neural networks recursing at different frequencies. This biologically inspired method beats Large Language models (LLMs) on hard puzzle tasks such as Sudoku, Maze, and ARC-AGI while trained with small models (27M parameters) on small data (around 1000 examples). HRM holds great promise for solving hard problems with small networks, but it is not yet well understood and may be suboptimal. We propose Tiny Recursive Model (TRM), a much simpler recursive reasoning approach that achieves significantly higher generalization than HRM, while using a single tiny network with only 2 layers. With only 7M parameters, TRM obtains 45% test-accuracy on ARC-AGI-1 and 8% on ARC-AGI-2, higher than most LLMs (e.g., Deepseek R1, o3-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro) with less than 0.01% of the parameters.
Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent
We introduce a method called TracIn that computes the influence of a training example on a prediction made by the model. The idea is to trace how the loss on the test point changes during the training process whenever the training example of interest was utilized. We provide a scalable implementation of TracIn via: (a) a first-order gradient approximation to the exact computation, (b) saved checkpoints of standard training procedures, and (c) cherry-picking layers of a deep neural network. In contrast with previously proposed methods, TracIn is simple to implement; all it needs is the ability to work with gradients, checkpoints, and loss functions. The method is general. It applies to any machine learning model trained using stochastic gradient descent or a variant of it, agnostic of architecture, domain and task. We expect the method to be widely useful within processes that study and improve training data.
Towards infinite context windows: neural KV cache compaction | Base Labs
Working to advance and democratize open-source intelligence.
Graph Structure of Neural Networks
View recent discussion. Abstract: Neural networks are often represented as graphs of connections between neurons. However, despite their wide use, there is currently little understanding of the relationship between the graph structure of the neural network and its predictive performance. Here we systematically investigate how does the graph structure of neural networks affect their predictive performance. To this end, we develop a novel graph-based representation of neural networks called relational graph, where layers of neural network computation correspond to rounds of message exchange along the graph structure. Using this representation we show that: (1) a "sweet spot" of relational graphs leads to neural networks with significantly improved predictive performance; (2) neural network's performance is approximately a smooth function of the clustering coefficient and average path length of its relational graph; (3) our findings are consistent across many different tasks and datasets; (4) the sweet spot can be identified efficiently; (5) top-performing neural networks have graph structure surprisingly similar to those of real biological neural networks. Our work opens new directions for the design of neural architectures and the understanding on neural networks in general.
Scalable Training of Artificial Neural Networks with Adaptive Sparse Connectivity inspired by Network Science
View recent discussion. Abstract: Through the success of deep learning in various domains, artificial neural networks are currently among the most used artificial intelligence methods. Taking inspiration from the network properties of biological neural networks (e.g. sparsity, scale-freeness), we argue that (contrary to general practice) artificial neural networks, too, should not have fully-connected layers. Here we propose sparse evolutionary training of artificial neural networks, an algorithm which evolves an initial sparse topology (Erdős-Rényi random graph) of two consecutive layers of neurons into a scale-free topology, during learning. Our method replaces artificial neural networks fully-connected layers with sparse ones before training, reducing quadratically the number of parameters, with no decrease in accuracy. We demonstrate our claims on restricted Boltzmann machines, multi-layer perceptrons, and convolutional neural networks for unsupervised and supervised learning on 15 datasets. Our approach has the potential to enable artificial neural networks to scale up beyond what is currently possible.
Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network
Our teams advance the state of the art through research, systems engineering, and collaboration across Google.
Deep Learning on a Data Diet: Finding Important Examples Early in Training
Recent success in deep learning has partially been driven by training increasingly overparametrized networks on ever larger datasets. It is therefore natural to ask: how much of the data is superfluous, which examples are important for generalization, and how do we find them? In this work, we make the striking observation that, in standard vision datasets, simple scores averaged over several weight initializations can be used to identify important examples very early in training. We propose two such scores—the Gradient Normed (GraNd) and the Error L2-Norm (EL2N) scores—and demonstrate their efficacy on a range of architectures and datasets by pruning significant fractions of training data without sacrificing test accuracy. In fact, using EL2N scores calculated a few epochs into training, we can prune half of the CIFAR10 training set while slightly improving test accuracy. Furthermore, for a given dataset, EL2N scores from one architecture or hyperparameter configuration generalize to other configurations. Compared to recent work that prunes data by discarding examples that are rarely forgotten over the course of training, our scores use only local information early in training. We also use our scores to detect noisy examples and study training dynamics through the lens of important examples—we investigate how the data distribution shapes the loss surface and identify subspaces of the model’s data representation that are relatively stable over training.
Neural Turing Machines
We extend the capabilities of neural networks by coupling them to external memory resources, which they can interact with by attentional processes. The combined system is analogous to a Turing Machine or Von Neumann architecture but is differentiable end-to-end, allowing it to be efficiently trained with gradient descent. Preliminary results demonstrate that Neural Turing Machines can infer simple algorithms such as copying, sorting, and associative recall from input and output examples.
Beyond neural scaling laws: beating power law scaling via data pruning
Widely observed neural scaling laws, in which error falls off as a power of the training set size, model size, or both, have driven substantial performance improvements in deep learning. However, these improvements through scaling alone require considerable costs in compute and energy. Here we focus on the scaling of error with dataset size and show how in theory we can break beyond power law scaling and potentially even reduce it to exponential scaling instead if we have access to a high-quality data pruning metric that ranks the order in which training examples should be discarded to achieve any pruned dataset size. We then test this improved scaling prediction with pruned dataset size empirically, and indeed observe better than power law scaling in practice on ResNets trained on CIFAR-10, SVHN, and ImageNet. Next, given the importance of finding high-quality pruning metrics, we perform the first large-scale benchmarking study of ten different data pruning metrics on ImageNet. We find most existing high performing metrics scale poorly to ImageNet, while the best are computationally intensive and require labels for every image. We therefore developed a new simple, cheap and scalable self-supervised pruning metric that demonstrates comparable performance to the best supervised metrics. Overall, our work suggests that the discovery of good data-pruning metrics may provide a viable path forward to substantially improved neural scaling laws, thereby reducing the resource costs of modern deep learning.
Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning
From an environmental standpoint, there are a few crucial aspects of training a neural network that have a major impact on the quantity of carbon that it emits. These factors include: the location of the server used for training and the energy grid that it uses, the length of the training procedure, and even the make and model of hardware on which the training takes place. In order to approximate these emissions, we present our Machine Learning Emissions Calculator, a tool for our community to better understand the environmental impact of training ML models. We accompany this tool with an explanation of the factors cited above, as well as concrete actions that individual practitioners and organizations can take to mitigate their carbon emissions.
Neural Networks: Zero To Hero
microsoft/FastContext-1.0-4B-SFT · Hugging Face
We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.
Stanford CS231N Deep Learning for Computer Vision | Spring 2025 | Lecture 1: Introduction
NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models | Hubert Banville
🧠 NeuralBench is now open source. Today we're releasing NeuralBench, a unified framework for benchmarking foundation models of brain activity, developed by the Brain & AI team at FAIR, Meta. 💻 Code: https://lnkd.in/dNJsgBgM 📄 White paper: https://lnkd.in/dvWMg7rx Brain foundation models are starting to show positive transfer to a range of downstream tasks, from brain-computer interfacing to clinical classification. But systematically evaluating them is hard: heterogeneous preprocessing pipelines, input structures, and adaptation methodologies make results difficult to compare. Most prior work also focuses on a narrow set of downstream tasks. NeuralBench addresses this by defining each task end-to-end with config files (data source, preprocessing, splits, optimiser, metrics, architecture) so all models can be evaluated on the same footing. What's in our first release, NeuralBench-EEG v1.0: ⚡ 36 EEG tasks across 94 public datasets, spanning motor imagery, clinical classification, cognitive decoding, and phenotype prediction. 🤖 Task-specific deep learning architectures (EEGNet, Deep4, EEGConformer, CTNet, ...) benchmarked side-by-side with recent EEG foundation models (BENDR, LaBraM, BIOT, CBraMod, LUNA, REVE). 🧩 Extensible to other neuroimaging modalities: the framework already runs MEG and fMRI tasks, leveraging our NeuralSet ecosystem for accessing brain imaging data and the broader neuroscientific software stack. 📜 Released under the MIT license. Help us make it better. Through our white paper, we invite the community to contribute new tasks, datasets, and models, especially for fMRI, MEG, and iEEG. The long-term goal is a fully unified benchmark across neuroimaging tasks and modalities. 🙏🙏🙏 This was a big team effort with Stéphane d'Ascoli, Simon Dahan, Jérémy RAPIN, Marlène Careil, Yohann Benchetrit, Jarod Lévy, Saarang P., Antoine Ratouchniak, Lucy (Mingfang) Zhang, Elisa Cascardi, Katie Begany, Teon Brooks, and Jean-Rémi King. Special thanks to Alexandre Gramfort, Thomas Moreau, Arnaud Delorme, Bruno A. and Pierre Guetschel for feedback and support. #Neuroscience #AI #NeuroAI #Python #OpenSource
