Large language models (LLMs) have made exciting achievements across various domains, yet their deployment on resource-constrained personal devices remains hindered by the prohibitive computational and memory demands of task-specific fine-tuning. While quantization offers a pathway to efficiency, existing methods struggle to balance performance and overhead, either incurring high computational/memory costs or failing to address activation outliers—a critical bottleneck in quantized fine-tuning. To address these challenges, we propose the Outlier Spatial Stability Hypothesis (__OSSH__): _During fine-tuning, certain activation outlier channels retain stable spatial positions across training iterations._ Building on OSSH, we propose __Quaff__, a Quantized parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework for LLMs, optimizing low-precision activation representations through targeted momentum scaling. Quaff dynamically suppresses outliers exclusively in invariant channels using lightweight operations, eliminating full-precision weight storage and global rescaling while reducing quantization errors. Extensive experiments across ten benchmarks validate OSSH and demonstrate Quaff’s efficacy. Specifically, on the GPQA reasoning benchmark, Quaff achieves a 1.73× latency reduction and 30% memory savings over full-precision fine-tuning while improving accuracy by 0.6% on the Phi-3 model, reconciling the triple trade-off between efficiency, performance, and deployability. By enabling consumer-grade GPU fine-tuning (e.g., RTX 2080 Super) without sacrificing model utility, Quaff democratizes personalized LLM deployment. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Quaff-B322/.

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used as a generative model to approximate a model’s posterior on latent variables by combining the amortized variational inference and deep neural networks. However, when paired with strong autoregressive decoders, VAE often converges to a degenerated local optimum known as “posterior collapse”. Previous approaches consider the Kullback–Leibler divergence (KL) individual for each datapoint. We propose to let the KL follow a distribution across the whole dataset, and analyze that it is sufficient to prevent posterior collapse by keeping the expectation of the KL’s distribution positive. Then we propose Batch Normalized-VAE (BN-VAE), a simple but effective approach to set a lower bound of the expectation by regularizing the distribution of the approximate posterior’s parameters. Without introducing any new model component or modifying the objective, our approach can avoid the posterior collapse effectively and efficiently. We further show that the proposed BN-VAE can be extended to conditional VAE (CVAE). Empirically, our approach surpasses strong autoregressive baselines on language modeling, text classification and dialogue generation, and rivals more complex approaches while keeping almost the same training time as VAE.

We present a new approach to the design of deep networks for natural language processing (NLP), based on the general technique of Tensor Product Representations (TPRs) for encoding and processing symbol structures in distributed neural networks. A network architecture — the Tensor Product Generation Network (TPGN) — is proposed which is capable in principle of carrying out TPR computation, but which uses unconstrained deep learning to design its internal representations. Instantiated in a model for image-caption generation, TPGN outperforms LSTM baselines when evaluated on the COCO dataset. The TPR-capable structure enables interpretation of internal representations and operations, which prove to contain considerable grammatical content. Our caption-generation model can be interpreted as generating sequences of grammatical categories and retrieving words by their categories from a plan encoded as a distributed representation.