arXiv Computation and Language

Revisiting the Shape Convention of Transformer Language Models

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Orthros: Phase-Aware Heterogeneous Attention for Efficient Transformers

Orthros introduces a phase‑aware heterogeneous attention mechanism that dynamically switches between linear‑complexity prefilling and full‑attention decoding, reducing the asymptotic cost compared to standard Transformers in long‑context scenarios. The method supports efficient Transformer‑to‑Orthros conversion, achieving higher performance than the original model and delivering a 21.9× prefilling speedup while maintaining strong in‑context recall, including 128K‑scale needle‑in‑a‑haystack tasks. These results demonstrate Orthros’s potential as a more efficient and flexible alternative for industrial Transformer applications.

By Yuhong Chou, Zehao Liu, Yuqi Pan, Qian Liu, Xianwei Chen, Zhongzhu Zhou, Jibin Wu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

Hyperloop Transformers

arXiv:2604. 21254v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM architecture research generally aims to maximize model quality subject to fixed compute/latency budgets.

By Abbas Zeitoun, Lucas Torroba-Hennigen, Yoon Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Your Transformer Is Secretly Elastic

The paper presents a retraining‑free technique that transforms pre‑trained transformers into elastic models capable of adapting to any computational budget on the fly. By jointly ranking every MLP neuron and attention head on a common scale and applying soft pruning across multiple sparsity targets, the method achieves smooth performance degradation up to 60% sparsity while outperforming one‑shot baselines. Experiments on 27 vision and text transformer encoders show significant parameter reductions with minimal accuracy loss and notable throughput and latency gains on GPUs, all produced in minutes.

By Walter Simoncini, Dheeraj Varghese, Gertjan J. Burghouts, Cees G. M. Snoek
arXiv AI
Sep 24

KITE: KV-Invariant Transformer Expansion for Efficient Agentic LLM Scaling

KITE (KV-Invariant Transformer Expansion) is a scaling paradigm that trains a language model from a smaller size to a larger one, saving training costs by upcycling. It places new parameters in regions that do not affect attention KV, so inference only requires prefilling KV from the smaller part, reducing inference costs. The Step Scale Transformer (SST), a two-tower decoder, demonstrates this by achieving lower training loss than comparable MoE Transformers while cutting estimated inference cost by 6.7% and 31.6%.

By Zhiheng Hu, Yixun Wei, Jian Zhou, Yizhuang Zhou, Ji Li, Xing Chen, Yang Li, Bojun Wang, Yibo Zhu, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Performance-Efficiency Tradeoffs in Transformers: An Approximation Theory Perspective

The paper examines how to allocate attention heads and head dimensions across Transformer layers to balance expressivity and efficiency. It provides a mathematical analysis of early layers’ role in information extraction and characterizes the trade‑off between head count and dimension under a fixed parameter budget. The authors prove a saturation effect of softmax activations, showing that increasing head dimensions yields diminishing returns, especially for long sequences, and propose strategies for efficient parameter allocation across layers.

By Ruoxi Yu, Haotian Jiang, Jingpu Cheng, Penghao Yu, Qianxiao Li, Zhong Li
arXiv AI
Jul 22

A Controlled Study of Attention-Only Transformers

arXiv:2607. 18363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Feed-forward networks hold two thirds of a transformer's non-embedding parameters, yet the architecture has not received a necessity test that controls parameters, compute, and depth at once.

By Henry Ndubuaku, Karen Mosoyan, Jakub Mroz, Noah Cylich, Satyajit Kumar, Parkirat Sandhu, Roman Shemet, Justin H Lee