arXiv Computation and Language

Switch Attention: Towards Dynamic and Fine-grained Hybrid Transformers

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 17

Olmo Hybrid: From Theory to Practice and Back

arXiv:2604. 03444v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention.

By William Merrill, Yanhong Li, Tyler Romero, Anej Svete, Caia Costello, Pradeep Dasigi, Dirk Groeneveld, David Heineman, Bailey Kuehl, Nathan Lambert, Chuan Li, Kyle Lo, Saumya Malik, DJ Matusz, Benjamin Minixhofer, Jacob Morrison, Luca Soldaini, Finbarr Timbers, Pete Walsh, Noah A. Smith, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Ashish Sabharwal
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

arXiv:2606. 15378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers.

By Ziqing Qiao, Yinuo Xu, Chaojun Xiao, Zhou Su, Zihan Zhou, Yingfa Chen, Xiaoyue Xu, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Scaling Parameter and Context in Attention: Native Sparse Attention from Mixture-of-Head

The paper introduces NAMOH, a native sparse attention mechanism that activates only a subset of heads per token, allowing each head to attend to a limited subsequence of tokens. By scaling the number of heads while keeping the active heads per token fixed, the method shortens head histories and reduces key‑value access without increasing overall storage. Experiments demonstrate that NAMOH can outperform fully activated models with the same parameter count and enable more efficient long‑context inference than smaller dense models.

By Zizhuo Fu, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Post-Boundary Bridge: Must Local Attention Go Global Between Global Layers?

The paper introduces Post-Boundary Bridge (PBB), a hybrid transformer architecture that keeps causal attention within blocks while adding direct connections across block boundaries. PBB focuses on within-block modeling and nearby exchange, delegating long-range communication to full-attention layers. Experiments on dense and mixture-of-experts models ranging from 205 million to 2.07 billion parameters show that PBB hybrids maintain near-full perplexity, competitive downstream performance, and improved source retrieval, while Flash-PBB achieves 1.82× faster decoding with half the local key‑value cache compared to Flash‑SWA.

By Zhibo Yang