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RiLM: Parameter-Efficient Language Modeling via Geodesic Decoding

arxiv.org/abs/2609.10305

Updated 50 min ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294GNENQPV666N97YAB1B9N

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 50 min ago
arXiv
2609.10305
T1 · 50 min ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 50 min ago

Abstract

Language models under one million parameters matter for edge deployment, domain adaptation, and reproducible research, yet a two-layer LSTM or Transformer at embedding width d = 128 still spends roughly one third of its capacity on the output matrix W_out in R^(d x |V|). We propose Riemannian Language Models (RiLM), which remove that layer entirely: context unfolds as a trajectory on a Riemannian manifold, and next-token probabilities arise from squared geodesic distance between the current state and vocabulary embeddings. The same embedding map serves input and output -- decoding is geometry. We instantiate the framework on flat R^d (Flat RiLM) and the Poincare ball H^d (HypRiLM) with a shared MLP composition map phi (~290k parameters, d = 128, |V| = 2000). Across five seeds on WikiText-2, HypRiLM reaches 54.2 +/- 0.2 validation perplexity versus 87.6 +/- 0.6 for Flat RiLM; tied and matched LSTM, Transformer, and SSM controls remain at 113-147 PPL on WT-2 -- HypRiLM leads by roughly 2x over the strongest tied recurrent baseline (SSM, 113.0 +/- 3.8). Penn Treebank and a 10k-vocabulary stress test confirm that geodesic decoding transfers across corpora and larger |V|, while hyperbolic curvature helps selectively. We also characterize boundary collapse in naive hyperbolic recurrence and show how Mobius stabilization restores trainability. Claims are scoped to controlled small-model comparisons, not full-vocabulary state of the art.

Authors 1

Fang Li

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Arxiv announce type
cross

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

arXiv id
2609.10305

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Categories
cs.CL, cs.AI

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 50 min agohigh

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Provenance

Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

50 min ago

Conflicts

None