Definition. Per-system cost vector [ftip-00L9]
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For each system, the cost vector \(\mathbf c\) contains training FLOPs, inference FLOPs, wall time, memory, energy when available, and context length. The primary scalar \(C\) and its weights are declared beside the vector; omitted coordinates are marked unknown.

Context

Paired measurements for model comparison [ftip-00L4]

A paired measurement specifies both model instances and their task, intervention, evaluation, and cost coordinates. These conditions determine the meaning of each point in the measured frontier.

Definition. Comparison pair identity [ftip-00L5]

A paired comparison identifies the two systems, exact checkpoint or training commit, architecture variant, parameter counts, tokenizer, and context limit. A label such as ``Transformer'' is insufficient when attention, cache, or layer patterns differ.

Definition. Common task and evaluation conditions [ftip-00L6]

Both systems use the same task family, prompt and data law, scoring rule, sampling seeds, stopping rule, and evaluator version. Any exception is a separate comparison arm, not an unrecorded architecture effect.

Definition. Training and post-training coordinates [ftip-00L7]

Record data volume, token order policy, optimizer and schedule, supervised tuning, feedback or reinforcement procedure, update count, and selection rule. The common-recipe arm fixes these coordinates; the equal-tuning arm allows predeclared alternatives with equal search resources.

Definition. Inference and systems coordinates [ftip-00L8]

Record hardware, software and kernel versions, precision, batch, cache policy, sequence lengths, warm-up procedure, concurrency, and decoding settings. A kernel or cache change that alters numerical computation is marked as an intervention rather than hidden as an implementation detail.

Definition. Per-system cost vector [ftip-00L9]
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Definition. Repeated measurement rule [ftip-00LA]

For each fixed workload and system, record warm-up runs, repetition count, random seeds, and the aggregation rule. Report mean and dispersion for time, memory, and score; a single fastest run cannot define a cost frontier.

Definition. Paired uncertainty estimates [ftip-00LB]

When the same evaluation items are used, report paired score differences and an uncertainty procedure fixed before inspecting the result. Confidence intervals quantify sampling variation; they do not repair unmatched training, systems, or task coordinates.

Example. Published Kimi Linear comparison [ftip-00LC]

Table 4 of the Kimi Linear report compares the experimental models pretrained on 1.4 trillion tokens in Example [ftip-00KV], after the same supervised fine-tuning (SFT) recipe. Both have 48 billion total and 3 billion active parameters. Three selected benchmark scores are [kimi2025linear, Sections 4 and 5.4 and Table 4]:

Arm	MMLU-Pro	LiveBench	EvalPlus
Kimi Linear	67.4	45.2	61.0
Full MLA	65.7	45.7	62.6

The entries use the paper's score units, with larger values better on each selected benchmark; LiveBench is reported as Pass@1. Kimi Linear is higher on MMLU-Pro and lower on LiveBench and EvalPlus in these observations. These are reported point estimates on different tasks, not a single capability score; the table supplies no uncertainty estimate.

The common recipe uses the K2 pretraining corpus, MuonClip and a shared training schedule. SFT proceeds from broad instruction data to targeted reasoning tasks; evaluation uses temperature 1.0 and an internal framework derived from LM-Harness [kimi2025linear, Section 5.4]. Thus the scores provide a concrete example of how the trained hybrid and full-MLA designs respond to the same recipe. The cost mechanism and its possible post-training consequences are developed in Example [ftip-00KZ].

Remark. Measured and assumed costs [ftip-00LD]

A useful cost model can combine measurements with assumptions justified by the architecture and its implementation. In Example [ftip-00L3], the generation share \(f\) and speed factor \(s_{\rm gen}\) determine a predicted attempt-throughput factor. Their assumed values can be varied without pretending they were measured in the original experiment.

For fixed \(f\in [0,1]\), write \(S(s)=1/(1-f+f/s)\) for \(s>0\). This function is nondecreasing. An interval \(s_{\rm gen}\in [s_-,s_+]\), with \(0<s_-\leq s_+\), therefore gives the conditional range \(S\in [S(s_-),S(s_+)]\). This is sensitivity to a chosen assumption range; it is a statistical confidence interval only if a sampling argument supplies that interpretation.

Definition. Measured contrasts and conditional predictions [ftip-00LE]

A measured paired contrast evaluates the same declared quantity for two observed model instances under a specified task, protocol and cost accounting. The common-recipe scores in Example [ftip-00LC] are one example. A confirmatory comparison fixes its matching and selection rules before examining the scores.

A conditional paired prediction instead uses an explicit model to supply one or more cost or response quantities, then derives the comparison under those assumptions. The discovery probabilities in Example [ftip-00L3] are an example. Such a prediction can be motivated by existing observations and guide a later experiment; its unmeasured inputs remain assumptions, and agreement with new matched measurements tests the model.

Example. How generation share changes the predicted gain [ftip-00LF]

Keep the illustrative generation factor \(s_{\rm gen}=2.2\) from Example [ftip-00L3] and vary the baseline generation share \(f\). Its cost model gives the following total attempt-throughput factors:

Generation share	Predicted throughput factor
20 percent	1.122
50 percent	1.375
80 percent	1.774
100 percent	2.200

These calculated values show why the same decoding improvement can matter much more for generation-heavy search than for a verifier- or optimizer-dominated workload. They suggest measuring the time spent in generation, verification and updates before selecting where to invest systems effort. A change in the bottleneck changes the useful intervention, even when the attention architecture stays fixed.

Remark. Testing the predicted architecture tradeoff [ftip-00LG]

The memory and discovery models predict the strongest benefit when long prefixes make attention state expensive, saved capacity improves useful rollout throughput, and per-attempt success remains above the break-even threshold. Short contexts, expensive verification, or strongly correlated attempts can weaken that benefit. These are distinct mechanisms to test, rather than a universal ranking of KDA and full attention.

A comparison across implementations can retain this reasoning while re-estimating state sizes, generation share and success probabilities for the new system. Report both the prediction and the matched measurements: their agreement or disagreement identifies which mechanism or assumption needs revision.