arXiv Computation and Language

TANGO: Token-Aggregated Nonlinear Gating Operators for Natural and Formal Language Modeling

The paper introduces TANGO, a new Transformer variant that replaces the standard self‑attention and feed‑forward sublayers with a single cross‑token gated residual update. Each token generates a SwiGLU gate, and query‑key similarities weight these gates to rescale destination features, yielding a quadratic‑time model. A windowed variant, WANGO, limits the gated interactions to a recent window and uses prefix statistics for older tokens, achieving linear‑time complexity while maintaining competitive performance.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

TANGO: Treating Tokens as Operators

The paper introduces TANGO, a Token‑Aggregated Nonlinear Gating Operator that blends cross‑token mixing and token‑wise transformation in transformer architectures. By computing a nonlinear gate per source token and averaging these gates for each destination, TANGO forms a source‑conditioned linear operator that improves predictive performance. Experiments on web text, formal mathematics, and code show that full‑prefix TANGO achieves the lowest test negative log‑likelihood across 16 settings, while a narrower variant offers substantial throughput gains with only a modest increase in loss.

By Joshua Nunley
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.

By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

InfoMamba: An Attention-Free Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model

InfoMamba is an attention‑free hybrid model that combines a minimal‑bandwidth global interface with a selective recurrent stream. The architecture replaces token‑level self‑attention with a concept bottleneck linear filtering layer and integrates it via an information‑maximizing fusion (IMF) that injects global context into the state‑space dynamics. Experiments across classification, dense prediction, and non‑vision tasks show that InfoMamba outperforms strong Transformer and SSM baselines while maintaining near‑linear scaling and competitive accuracy‑efficiency trade‑offs.

By Youjin Wang, Jiaqiao Zhao, Rong Fu, Run Zhou, Ruizhe Zhang, Jiani Liang, Suisuai Cao, Feng Zhou
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

ATMA: Length-Invariant Language Modeling via Polar Attention and Gated-Delta Compression Memory

arXiv:2606. 25156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern large language models based on softmax scaled-dot-product attention are constrained by their training sequence length: as the key-value sequence grows, softmax probability mass can dilute across a wider distribution, inducing activation shift and long-context performance collapse.

By Habibullah Akbar