The Key to Going Linear: Analysis-Driven Transformer Linearization
arXiv:2607. 07706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quadratic cost of causal self-attention severely bottlenecks long-context transformer inference.
The quadratic cost of causal self-attention severely bottlenecks long-context transformer inference. While numerous post hoc linearization pipelines exist, it is difficult to identify which components preserve model quality.
arXiv:2607. 07706v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quadratic cost of causal self-attention severely bottlenecks long-context transformer inference.
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.
arXiv:2606. 01294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention by maintaining a recurrent fast-weight state, but it consistently lags on in-context retrieval and long-context tasks.
arXiv:2607. 00479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based large models have demonstrated remarkable generalization abilities across different tasks by leveraging a context-aware attention module for in-context learning.
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.
arXiv:2608. 12435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers owe much of their strong long-context retrieval capability to a token-level memory that grows with context length.
arXiv:2607. 06523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context language model inference is increasingly limited by the memory bandwidth and capacity required to store key-value caches, yet existing compression methods often apply uniform budgets across layers or tokens and degrade retrieval when lexical cues and semantic states require different preservation.
arXiv:2607. 24788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models scale to increasingly long contexts, the memory I/O and computational overhead of the Key-Value (KV) cache during decoding emerges as the primary throughput bottleneck.
Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length. Recent techniques to compress the KV cache fall short: they either degrade model quality substantially or require considerable time and compute to compress a single long prompt.
arXiv:2606. 16093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
arXiv:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.
arXiv:2608. 19920v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A lot of prior work addressed key-value (KV) cache selection and compression by sparse attention to enable long-context inference for transformer language models without excessive hardware budgets.