> Industry Track Awards

> Best Paper

> Speed Without Sacrifice: Fine-Tuning Language Models with Medusa and Knowledge Distillation in Travel Applications

> Daniel Zagyva, Emmanouil Stergiadis, Laurens van der Maas, Aleksandra Dokic, Eran Fainman, Ilya Gusev, Moran Beladev

Per TFA, the paper we’re looking for is this one:

> Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention

> Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Y. X. Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng

I’m not finding it by author on the page you linked but I think it’s this reference by title:

> DeepSeek × PKU × UW — Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention

I did find it on this page:

https://2025.aclweb.org/program/main_papers/

Their innovations in training efficiency were almost guaranteed to have been heavily considered by the big AI labs. For example, Dario Amodei talks about the efficiency improvements being the real important contribution of DeepSeek V3 here: https://www.darioamodei.com/post/on-deepseek-and-export-cont...

> DeepSeek's team did this via some genuine and impressive innovations, mostly focused on engineering efficiency. There were particularly innovative improvements in the management of an aspect called the "Key-Value cache", and in enabling a method called "mixture of experts" to be pushed further than it had before.

And the saltiness of US labs about DeepSeek is well-known. "O3, explain model distillation like I'm five."

No Sam, explain intellectual property rights to the judge in the NYT test case asshole.