Re:Starting from scratch: Training a 30M Topological Transfo...
by nickpsecurity on Monday January 19, 2026 @06:53PM
(#46686219)
I misunderstood what you said.
Well, in your work, whay benefit did you get from it? And do you think it would be beneficial today combined with modern techniques? Or obsoleted by other technqiue?
(I ask because I'm finding many old techniques are still good or could be mixed with deep learning.)
Re:Starting from scratch: Training a 30M Topological Transfo...
by thesz on Monday January 19, 2026 @08:03PM
(#46686658)
At the time (2018), it had perplexity close to LSTM, while having more coefficients and much shorter (hours vs days) training time.
I tried to apply SNMLM's ideas to the byte-level prediction modeling here: https://github.com/thesz/snmlm-per-byte
It was not bad, but I had trouble scaling it to the 1B set. Mostly because I have not enough time.
I do hold same mindset as yours, that many old techniques are misunderstood or underapplied. For example, decision trees, in my experiments, allow for bit-length-per-byte comparable to LSTM (lstm-compress or LSTM in nncp experiments): https://github.com/thesz/codeta
I was using their model in my work.