TEMPLAR PUBLICATIONS

Papers05 publications

Technical reports from building pre-training and post-training systems across open, heterogeneous compute.

March 2026TPLR-005

Covenant-72B: Pre-Training a 72B LLM with Trustless Peers Over-the-Internet

Joel Lidin / Amir Sarfi / Erfan Miahi / Quentin Anthony / Shivam Chauhan / Evangelos Pappas / Benjamin Therien / Eugene Belilovsky / Samuel Dare

A 72B-parameter language model trained with open, permissionless participation over commodity internet links, using Gauntlet incentives and SparseLoCo compression to keep unreliable peers useful.

January 2026TPLR-003

Heterogeneous Low-Bandwidth Pre-Training of LLMs

Yazan Obeidi / Amir Sarfi / Joel Lidin / Paul Janson / Eugene Belilovsky

A framework for letting resource-limited participants form a SparseLoCo replica through compressed pipeline parallelism while better-connected replicas stay full precision.

August 2025TPLR-002

Communication Efficient LLM Pre-Training with SparseLoCo

Amir Sarfi / Benjamin Therien / Joel Lidin / Eugene Belilovsky

SparseLoCo replaces dense pseudo-gradient exchange with chunked TOP-k sparsification, local error feedback, and 2-bit values while matching or improving DiLoCo-style pre-training.

May 2025TPLR-001

Incentivizing Permissionless Distributed Learning of LLMs

Joel Lidin / Amir Sarfi / Evangelos Pappas / Samuel Dare / Eugene Belilovsky / Jacob Steeves

Gauntlet scores pseudo-gradient contributions from untrusted peers with fast reliability checks, loss-before/after validation, and persistent OpenSkill ratings.