arXiv Machine Learning

More Expressive Feedforward Layers: Part I. Token-Adaptive Mixing of Activations

The paper introduces Mixture of Activations (MoA), a token‑adaptive feedforward network design that mixes multiple activation functions using lightweight gates while sharing linear projections. It also presents learnable activations (LA) as an input‑independent variant. The authors theoretically prove that MoA strictly surpasses both fixed‑activation FFNs and LA in expressive power, and empirically demonstrate that MoA achieves lower loss and better scaling on dense and MoE language models from 0.12 B to 2 B parameters with minimal overhead.

arXiv AI
Jul 28

cMoLLM at Scale: Horizontal Scaling Laws for Mixture-of-LLMs

arXiv:2607. 22577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling large language models (LLMs) has driven their success, yet dense Transformers couple capacity and computation: every parameter is activated for every token, making training and inference costs grow linearly with model size-a critical bottleneck as models approach trillion-parameter regimes.

By Xin Yang, Yemin Wang, Mingda Liu, Letian Li, Shuaishuai Cao, Zhengxiao He, Ryan Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

SG-Blend: Learning an Interpolation Between Improved Swish and GELU for Robust Neural Representations

SG-Blend introduces a per‑layer adaptive activation that interpolates between a bias‑corrected, parametric Swish variant (SSwish) and GELU, using a learnable blend coefficient, sharpness, and zero‑centering bias. The method adds only three scalars per feed‑forward block and, on BERT‑style IMDB classification, matches peak accuracy while reducing seed‑to‑seed variance by 42 %. It also achieves the lowest validation perplexity on WikiText103 and generalizes to computer vision and other domains.

By Gaurav Sarkar, Syed Affan Daimi, Jay Gala, Subarna Tripathi
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
Aug 27

Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation

The paper introduces Gated Recurrent Transformers, a depth‑sharing architecture that brackets a single shared core with fixed prelude and coda blocks and uses a lightweight projection and element‑wise update gate to modulate recurrent updates. This design allows functional specialization across recurrences while reducing memory footprint. Experiments show that, under equal FLOPs or parameter budgets, the recurrent model matches or surpasses deeper GPT‑2 Small baselines, achieving similar or better accuracy with fewer parameters and lower peak decoding memory.

By Amr Hegazy, Amr Alanwar, Mostafa Elhoushi