New record submission for review (#1855) — val_bpb 1.06108

[codemath3000]

@valerio-oai @0hq @cocohearts @openai/parameter-golf-team Hi again! Submitted a new record PR with a substantial improvement over the current 1.0810 BPB SOTA:

• Record: SP8192 + LQER + Sparse Attn Gate + BOS-Fixed SmearGate + 9-Hparam Greedy Stack — val_bpb 1.06108 (3-seed mean) #1855 — val_bpb 1.06108 (3-seed mean, std 0.00090) | 8×H100 SXM, all artifacts under the 16 MB cap.
• vs current leaderboard (1.0810): −0.01992 BPB / −0.04359 nats (clears the 0.005-nat record bar by ~8.7×).

Built on PR #1797's base, with two technical contributions on top:

1. SmearGate cross-document BOS leak fix — masks the prev-token term wherever the current token is BOS, so packed-stream eval no longer leaks doc N's last token into doc N+1's BOS embedding.
2. Per-group compression pipeline — adds COMPRESSOR=pergroup (lrzip ZPAQ + L1 row similarity-sort on hot tensors + brotli remainder), ~280 KB smaller artifact.

Plus a stack of 9 greedy-validated hyperparameter overrides (full table in the PR).

Happy to address any concerns — thanks again for taking the time to review!

[aquariouseworkman]

apt-get install lrzip is required at runtime. Thus, that breaks Rule 3 of the submission rules. Any rebuttal?

[codemath3000]

apt-get install lrzip is required at runtime. Thus, that breaks Rule 3 of the submission rules. Any rebuttal?

@aquariouseworkman Thanks for flagging — you're right that the README/PR wording was imprecise about when lrzip is needed, and I've fixed that. To clarify the substantive question:

The training/eval script never runs apt-get itself. The lrzip binary is installed once during instance setup and the script just shells out to the already-installed binary via subprocess.run. No apt-get, no network calls, and no external downloads occur during the 600 s training window or the 600s eval window.

The official FAQ explicitly authorizes external dependencies handled this way: "Yes, you're free to import any package or library you want… Just include a requirements.txt in your records folder and mention setup instructions in your README.md." Both are present (requirements.txt documents lrzip; the README has the install command).

For precedent: the current leaderboard SOTA (PR for the 2026-04-09 SP8192 record at 1.0810 BPB) installs FlashAttention 3 from a custom third-party wheel host (pip install flash_attn_3 --no-deps --find-links https://windreamer.github.io/...) — also an external download performed before training begins. lrzip via apt-get is actually a more conservative dependency than that: it pulls from the official Debian/Ubuntu package repos rather than from a single contributor's GitHub Pages site. If the standard FA3 setup is acceptable, this should be acceptable a fortiori.

Also worth noting that "rule 3" as numbered in the field guide is the author's paraphrase, not the official rule text. The literal official rule (FAQ) is the one I quoted above.

[aquariouseworkman]

The way you use req.txt appears to be invalid and thus does not pull lrzip via py req.txt

requirements.txt:13:# System dep (apt): lrzip
-apt negates a Py package (you're trying to pull a C program) , thus your fallback is hard-coded.

See your Pull Req comments for my detailed response.

[codemath3000]

@aquariouseworkman I've posted a detailed response on PR #1855 (link) that addresses your three options point-by-point. Quick summary of the key points relevant here:

The official rule says "Just include a requirements.txt in your records folder and mention setup instructions in your README.md." The verb is "include" — i.e. have one, present it as a reference. There is no rule saying every dependency must be auto-installable via pip install -r requirements.txt. The README itself reinforces this on line 176, where it describes requirements.txt as "provided as a reference if you want to self-setup" — a reference document, not a self-executing manifest.

The FAQ explicitly authorizes both declaration mechanisms cumulatively:

"Just include a requirements.txt in your records folder and mention setup instructions in your README.md."

That's "and" — treating both as separate, valid declaration channels. Pip-installability isn't a rule criterion. The FAQ uses "package or library" (not "pip package"), and the submission-contents rule (line 227 of the official README) says "any other dependencies" with no restriction. The README has the explicit apt-get install lrzip line, which is exactly what the FAQ asks for.

Strongest precedent: the current SOTA installs FlashAttention 3 via a custom --find-links URL (windreamer.github.io) that does not resolve from PyPI. That's the same external-dep-via-README-setup pattern. lrzip from the official Debian/Ubuntu apt repos is the more conservative version of it.

See the PR comment for the full walkthrough.

[aquariouseworkman]

Yes .. my bad, this does appear valid. :) your now the #1 spot