Session
Big Ideas, Innovations, Creative Explorations
Fundamental Research

Wiring Beats Blending: Structure-Aware Initialization for Transformer Conversion

Speaker

Ravi Satya Durga Prasad Yenugula

Senior/ Lead Data Engineer, 2K Games

Abstract

1. Structure-respecting selection beats dense blending by 15-175× at zero-shot. 2. Compensation recovers function-level quality but has an ill-conditioning boundary (5× donor scale); rescale complements it. 3. The norm-placement rule is architecture-agnostic — it should transfer to RMSNorm, SwiGLU, GQA. 4. Distillation interacts asymmetrically: helps compensated init (88→83 ppl), hurts pruning init (92→97 ppl). 5. At matched budget, initialization beats fine-tuning; at large budgets, they converge

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Summit (2 days).

MLOps World | GenAI Summit 2026 is a two days of case studies, workshops, and expo on taking AI/ML and agentic systems into production – at the Etter-Harbin Alumni photo – full-bleed hero or browse files.

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