cs.LGSep 24, 2026

DanLing NestedTensor: Composable Multi-Ragged Tensors for Deep Learning

Authors: Zhiyuan Chen

Organizations: DanLing Team

Abstract

Variable-size inputs are common in deep learning, but dense batching allocates a shared envelope and spends computation on padding. The cost multiplies across varying axes: an explicit pair state allocates BNmax⁡2BN_{\max}^2 positions instead of ∑iNi2\sum_i N_i^2. Packing removes that waste, but composing packed operations still requires the logical axes and sample boundaries a flat buffer no longer exposes. We present DanLing NestedTensor, a PyTorch tensor abstraction that makes multi-ragged structure a property of the tensor itself. Packed values carry tensor-backed partitions and logical dimension order, so broadcasting creates ragged axes, feature transformations retain them, and reductions consume them. The same representation carries through autograd and both eager and compiled execution. On an A100, the geometric-mean speedup over same-mode padding is 2.74×\times eager and 3.39×\times compiled across four BERT scales, and 1.97×\times eager across four FCN backbones. A four-block Pairformer-style workload runs 2.40-4.32×\times faster than a padded reference using native PyTorch kernels across square length regimes in eager execution, with peak allocation falling from 38.08 to 5.41 GiB on its high-variation batch. The tensor interface lets model code built from its supported operators compose efficient variable-size computation without managing offsets at any call site. Code will be released publicly upon publication.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables1 asset

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Oct 12, 2026

BARTER: Compact Dynamic Sparse Training with Standard Dense Kernels

Dynamic sparse training (DST) aims to reduce training costs while maintaining accuracy. Existing DST methods mask out parameters but keep matrix dimensions unchanged. Training speedups therefore depend on specialized support, such as sparse kernels. We introduce BARTER, a structured DST framework that reduces training cost using standard dense kernels by keeping training tensors physically compact while dynamically reallocating capacity across layers. Unlike existing works that require computing gradients for all parameters, BARTER instead uses statistics collected only from active units during ordinary backpropagation to prune and clone attention heads and feed-forward channels under separate fixed global budgets. At each topology update, it resizes the affected parameter tensors and remaps their optimizer states, so subsequent training steps operate directly on the compact model. Training and fine-tuning experiments with Transformer-based vision models on two image classification benchmarks at densities from 0.10.1 to 0.70.7 show competitive Top-1 accuracy relative to full-tensor DST baselines. On an NVIDIA L40, BARTER achieves speedups of up to 6.29×6.29\times in measured training segments and reduces peak allocated GPU memory by up to 81.3%81.3\% relative to these implementations. An iPhone 13 Pro Max training benchmark additionally shows a 2.78×2.78\times speedup over the full-tensor DST baseline.
Sep 29, 2026

RLX: A Unified Multi-Backend Tensor Compiler and Distributed Runtime in Rust

Production machine learning (ML) stacks often split graph compilation and kernel execution across different layers and languages, making backend behavior, deployment guarantees, and performance fallbacks hard to reason about end-to-end. RLX addresses this gap with a single Rust codebase that combines compiler and runtime roles around one primitive-level, three-level intermediate representation (IR), plus a transparent dispatch contract that resolves each operator to native, common-IR, or rewritten lowering and fails compilation when legalization is not possible. The same IR targets fourteen runtime devices (cpu, metal, mlx, ane, cuda, rocm, oneapi, tpu, hexagon, gpu, vulkan, opengl, directx, webgpu) and two specialty codegen paths (Cortex-M INT8 and FPGA), ingests safetensors, GGUF, ONNX, and rten formats, supports F16/BF16/F64/C64 and quantized INT4/INT8 flows with AMP/PTQ/QAT, and scales via tensor-/pipeline-parallel collectives over TCP and RDMA transports. Beyond neural workloads, RLX also extends to scientific/physics-style domains through sparse and dense linear algebra extensions (e.g., CSR LU/CG/matvec and LAPACK- backed factorizations) and 3D Gaussian splatting operators. We evaluate RLX against PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, candle, burn, tch, rten, MLX, CoreML, IREE, Glow, TensorRT, and tinygrad under identical input generation and p50 measurement methodology on one host. On all-MiniLM-L6-v2, RLX-Metal is fastest at every batch (e.g., 16.6 ms at batch 32 vs. PyTorch-MPS 26.7 ms). In the MNIST training table, RLX also has the top-throughput entry (graph-fused MLP: 946,487 img/s), above NumPy+BLAS (787,349 img/s), while retaining 100% top-1 parity on reference checks (e.g., Qwen3).
Feb 9, 2026

DynamiQ: Accelerating Gradient Synchronization using Compressed Multi-hop All-reduce

Multi-hop all-reduce is the de facto backbone of large model training. As the training scale increases, the network often becomes a bottleneck, motivating the reduction of the volume of transmitted data. Accordingly, recent systems have demonstrated significant acceleration of the training process using gradient quantization. However, these systems are not optimized for multi-hop aggregation, where entries are partially summed multiple times along their aggregation topology. We present DynamiQ, a quantization framework that bridges the gap between quantization best practices and multi-hop aggregation. DynamiQ introduces novel techniques to better represent partial sums, codesigned with a decompress accumulate recompress fused kernel to facilitate fast execution. We extend PyTorch DDP to support DynamiQ over NCCL P2P, and across different LLMs, tasks, and scales, we demonstrate consistent improvement of up to 34.2% over the best among state-of-the-art methods such as Omni-Reduce, THC, and emerging standards such as MXFP4, MXFP6, and MXFP8. Further, DynamiQ is the only evaluated method that consistently reaches near-baseline accuracy (e.g., 99.9% of the BF16 baseline) and does so while significantly accelerating the training.