Thermodynamic Routing of Stale Gradients via Non-Associative Information Geometry

Paper: 218 Portfolio C (AI) — AI & Deep Learning

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20077198

Abstract

Introduces Non-Associative Information Geometry (NAIG) Routing for distributed LLM training. By mapping gradient drift into the 14-dimensional Lie algebra $\mathfrak{g}_2$, NAIG evaluates staleness not by Euclidean magnitude but by topological contradiction against a ground-truth reference, via the rank-4 Fano-Fisher metric. The MGE thermodynamically freezes out Fano-incompatible gradients while executing Topological Rescue on geometrically coherent stale updates. NAIG operates as a pure topological control layer over standard Euclidean SGD, requiring no modification to the optimizer or hardware. Demonstrated on GPT-2 (124M) with a 35,000× dimensional compression of the routing signal.

Key Results

  • Experiment A (Gram-Schmidt Audit): NAIG detects topology invisible to cosine similarity — workers with identical cosine distance are correctly separated by Fano compatibility.
  • Experiment B (GPT-2 cluster): NAIG achieves −31% final loss vs. Hogwild! with an effective routing dimensionality of 4 (not 5M).
  • Auto-annealing: No schedule required — G₂ geometry spontaneously freezes contradictions during exploration and thaws at convergence.

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