TraceRelay is an attention‑aligned recurrent architecture that spreads persistent representations across a rolling sequence of low‑dimensional traces. It uses right‑looking attention to build increments, delays their delivery until all attended inputs are in the causal past, and then applies a fixed additive phase recurrence to accumulate them; left‑looking attention reads the resulting residual‑augmented stream. Experiments on 36 small models across tasks such as Equal Repeats, bounded Dyck closing‑type prediction, and causal Most‑Freq generation show that models with recurrent phase inheritance achieve high accuracy within the trained length, while performance drops sharply beyond that range, and that the optimal size of recurrent traces varies by task.
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: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:2609.36337v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Tabular foundation models achieve strong performance by conditioning on labelled examples in context, but softmax attention limits their use on large d...
By David Schnurr, Felix Sarnthein, Thomas Hofmann, Imanol Schlag
arXiv:2610.16301v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Self-attention assigns two functions to one mechanism-where to read and how to mix-at the price of O(L^2) training, an O(T) decode state, and position...
By Helong Hu (Zhanjiang Campus, Guangdong Ocean University, Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China), Hongdan Pan (Maoming Administrative Service Center, Maoming, Guangdong, China), Shuiqing Hu (China Pacific Insurance)
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:2609.37169v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Mid-training equips pretrained large language models with specialized and reasoning capabilities, but the returns of this stage are bounded since add...
By Zhehao Huang, Changxin Tian, Qingyuan Yang, Kunlong Chen, Ziqi Liu, Zhiqiang Zhang, Xiaolin Huang, Jun Zhou
arXiv:2606. 18587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens.
By Zhiyuan Wang, Xuan Luo, Sirui Zeng, Xifeng Yan
arXiv:2606. 27538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the context-ready transformer, a new recurrent neural network architecture built from a D-layer transformer block that pre-contextualizes each token before it enters the block.
By Mahesh Godavarti
The paper introduces recirculation, an inference‑time architectural enhancement for foundation models that reduces perplexity and improves accuracy on generation and reasoning tasks without adding significant latency. Recirculation adds a specific form of recurrence, enabling the model to function as a dynamical system that tracks belief states, and is distinct from chain‑of‑thought or depth‑recurrence methods. An adaptive variant requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and achieves notable gains on the Gemma3 family, including a 23% perplexity drop and a 21% accuracy increase on GSM8k.
By Michael C. Mozer, Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Danny Sawyer, Sunny Sanyal, Rosanne Liu
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:2607. 01523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recurrent memory agents extend LLMs to arbitrarily long contexts by iteratively consolidating input into a fixed-size memory window.
By Jiatong Li, Samuel Yeh, Sharon Li