Shashvat Singham

Selection Under an Imperfect Verifier: An Extreme-Value Theory of Test-Time Compute

Test-time procedures such as best-of-n sampling, reranking and verifier-guided search all share one structure: many candidates are drawn, one is selected by a learned score, and the user receives the true quality of the selected candidate. The score and the truth are different ra...

The Spectrum, Not the Norm: Noise and Inexactness in Orthogonalised Steepest Descent

Orthogonalised momentum methods - which replace a matrix-shaped update by the polar factor of its momentum buffer - have become competitive with Adam for training transformers, and are exactly steepest descent in the spectral norm. This paper asks what actually controls their beh...