Parameter Golf: What Really Works?
How far can a language model improve under a strict artifact budget? Parameter Golf posed this question as an open community challenge in which participants trained the best language model, with the complete artifact (training code + compressed weights) required to fit within 16 MB and to be trained in under ten minutes on 8xH100 SXM GPUs. Quality was measured in bits-per-byte (BPB), the average number of bits required to encode each byte of unseen text. We analyze 2,037 pull requests and 1,430 clean-scored submissions from the contest, build a taxonomy of 84 optimization techniques, and measure each technique's contribution to BPB. The verified leaderboard score dropped from 1.2244 to 1....
| Authors | Prashanna Mani Paudel, Shivanand Venkanna Sheshappanavar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 1 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 September 2026 |
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