Marin experiment: reusing midpoint activations for K/V in YOCO yields up to 1.12x effective speedup

liliang_ren · x · 2026-09-09

A Marin community agent-generated experiment builds a parameter-preserving YOCO-style attention variant: all second-half layers take K/V from one shared midpoint activation instead of their residual streams.

Across three one-seed runs at d512/d768/d1024, terminal Paloma loss improved (e.g., d512: 3.5794 → 3.5570) with only 0.6-0.7% training throughput loss, giving effective speedups of 1.121x/1.025x/1.077x. The primary motivation is inference prefill: once the first half is evaluated, upper-layer cache work reduces to K/V projection GEMMs per layer.

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