arXiv Machine Learning

Taylor-Calibrate: Principled Initialization for Hybrid Linear Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606. 16429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid linear attention models offer an appealing path to faster long-context inference: they reduce the quadratic cost and KV-cache burden of full softmax attention while retaining much of the quality of Transformer models.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Effective Distillation to Hybrid xLSTM Architectures

arXiv:2603. 15590v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There have been numerous attempts to distill quadratic attention-based large language models (LLMs) into sub-quadratic linearized architectures.

By Lukas Hauzenberger, Niklas Schmidinger, Thomas Schmied, Anamaria-Roberta Hartl, David Stap, Pieter-Jan Hoedt, Maximilian Beck, Sebastian B\"ock, G\"unter Klambauer, Sepp Hochreiter
arXiv AI
Jun 2

DASH: Dual-Branch Score Distillation for Guidance-Calibrated Compact Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606. 00798v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Parameter compression of class-conditional diffusion models reveals an underexplored limitation in output-level distillation: the unconditional score branch remains unsupervised, leaving the classifier-free guidance gap underdetermined in the student.

By Abdullah Al Shafi, Kazi Saeed Alam, Sk Imran Hossain, Engelbert Mephu Nguifo
arXiv AI
Jul 10

Curriculum Learning for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Distillation via Structure-Aware Masking and GRPO

arXiv:2602. 17686v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from large language models into compact student models presents a fundamental challenge: teacher rationales are often too verbose for smaller models to faithfully reproduce.

By Bowen Yu, Maolin Wang, Sheng Zhang, Binhao Wang, Yi Wen, Jingtong Gao, Bowen Liu, Zimo Zhao, Wanyu Wang, Xiangyu Zhao
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 AI
Jun 4

MesaNet: Sequence Modeling by Locally Optimal Test-Time Training

arXiv:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.

By Johannes von Oswald, Nino Scherrer, Seijin Kobayashi, Luca Versari, Songlin Yang, Sarthak Mittal, Maximilian Schlegel, Kaitlin Maile, Yanick Schimpf, Oliver Sieberling, Alexander Meulemans, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie, Charlotte Frenkel, Razvan Pascanu, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento