arXiv AI

M$^2$RNN: Non-Linear RNNs with Matrix-Valued States for Scalable Language Modeling

M$^2$RNN introduces matrix‑valued hidden states and expressive non‑linear transitions for recurrent neural networks, addressing the limited expressive power of transformers. The architecture scales efficiently with tensor cores, achieving perfect state‑tracking generalization on unseen sequence lengths and outperforming hybrid Gated DeltaNet models by 0.4–0.5 perplexity points on a 7B MoE model while using three‑times smaller recurrent states. Even a single M$^2$RNN layer in a hybrid architecture yields accuracy gains comparable to full Hybrid M$^2$RNN, and improves long‑context performance on LongBench by up to 8 points over state‑of‑the‑art hybrid linear attention models.

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

baseVultra: Compact Nonlinear Recurrence with Reallocated Capacity

The paper introduces baseVultra, a compact recurrent neural network cell that reallocates most of its recurrent capacity to a single dense candidate‑generation matrix while simplifying gate operations to O(H) diagonal interactions. On character‑level language modeling benchmarks such as TinyShakespeare and text8, baseVultra matches or slightly outperforms parameter‑matched LSTM and GRU cells, achieving lower validation loss and competitive bits‑per‑character scores. The authors find that the advantages of this candidate‑focused design are most pronounced in low‑capacity regimes, whereas full‑gate cells remain competitive when hidden size is increased.

By Linke Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 15

History Replays Itself: Unleashing Long-Context Capability in Linear Attention

arXiv:2610.15715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear attention promises the efficiency needed for long-context language modelling, yet its fixed-size recurrent state must simultaneously support ong...

By Li Nanbo, Firas Laakom, Yilan Zhang, Piotr Pi\k{e}kos, Yimeng Chen, Liangyu Wang, Yifan Xu, Mateusz Ostaszewski, Dandan Guo, Wenyi Wang, Yanning Dai, Yuhui Wang, J\"{u}rgen Schmidhuber
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Learning State-Tracking from Code Using Linear RNNs

arXiv:2602. 14814v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Over the last years, state-tracking tasks, particularly permutation composition, have become a testbed to understand the limits of sequence models architectures like Transformers and RNNs (linear and non-linear).

By Julien Siems, Riccardo Grazzi, Korbinian P\"oppel, Kirill Kalinin, Hitesh Ballani, Babak Rahmani
arXiv AI
Jun 9

MinMax Recurrent Neural Cascades

arXiv:2605. 06384v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce MinMax Recurrent Neural Cascades (MinMax RNCs), a class of recurrent neural networks built from a novel form of recurrence over the MinMax algebra.

By Alessandro Ronca
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Structured Recurrent Mixers for Massively Parallelized Sequence Generation

arXiv:2605. 08696v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Over the last two decades, language modeling has experienced a shift from the use of predominantly recurrent architectures that process tokens sequentially during training and inference to non-recurrent models that process sequence elements in parallel during training, which results in greater training efficiency and stability at the expense of lower inference throughput.

By Benjamin L. Badger