what we measured

Research

One question per entry, a measurement against controls, and what did not work. Code and data are open: our numbers can be recomputed with one command.

A Cheap Skill-Overlap Score Beat GPU Rerankers: How We Filter Garbage Candidates Before the LLM

In our candidate matching, nearly half of what reaches the expensive LLM stage is garbage. We tried GPU rerankers, CrossEncoder fine-tuning and feature combos to filter it cheaper. The simplest signal won — skill overlap. Here are the numbers, what worked, and why text lost to skills.

Authors: slavb18

  • AI
  • HR Tech
  • LLM
  • Information Retrieval
  • Reranking
  • Cross-Encoder
  • Sentence Transformers
  • Embeddings
  • Matching
  • MLOps
  • Cost Optimization
  • bge-reranker
  • Machine Learning

Latent Debates Between LoRA Experts: How We Made Models Argue in Hidden Space — and Learned to Read Those Arguments

An engineering deep-dive: a council of LoRA experts that exchange hidden states instead of text, and a decoder that reads those thoughts back into text. With the war stories, the measurements, and the honest negative results.

Authors: slavb18

  • AI
  • LLM
  • LoRA
  • ML
  • Research
  • Latent Space
  • HRTech

Compress Four Tokens into One Vector: Running CALM Autoencoder on Domain-Specific Data (and on a Single CPU)

We took the autoencoder from the recent CALM (Continuous Autoregressive Language Models) work, which learns to pack a chunk of K=4 tokens into a single continuous vector and unpack it back, and trained it not on 15 billion Pile tokens on 8 GPUs, as in the original, but on 18 thousand short strings of requirements from IT job postings - on a regular machine without a graphics card. Along the way, we encountered three classic pitfalls (flash-attn without CUDA, deepspeed that doesn't import under NumPy 2.x, and a silent OOM on 33 GB of logits). Below is a detailed analysis of the architecture, configurations, and honest round-trip reconstruction results.

Authors: slavb18

  • CALM
  • Autoencoder
  • Machine Learning
  • Deep Learning
  • NLP
  • LLM
  • CPU
  • Domain Adaptation
  • Python
  • VAE
  • Optimization
  • Development
  • Infrastructure
  • NumPy 2.0
  • DeepSpeed
  • Flash Attention
  • GPU-free