arXiv AI

ZetaGPT: A Reference Implementation of Positional--Encoding--Free State--Space--Attention Language Models

arXiv:2608. 09432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based language models rely on self-attention, whose computation is permutation-equivariant and therefore lacks an intrinsic mechanism for representing token order.

arXiv AI
Jun 8

RePo: Language Models with Context Re-Positioning

arXiv:2512. 14391v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning is fundamental to modern Large Language Models (LLMs); however, prevailing architectures impose a rigid and fixed contextual structure by assigning linear or constant positional indices.

By Huayang Li, Tianyu Zhao, Deng Cai, Richard Sproat
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Relational Attention for Data-Efficient Language Modeling

Relational BabyLM is a decoder‑only Transformer that replaces standard self‑attention with a Dual Attention Transformer (DAT) to separate object‑level lexical features from structural/relational information. The model incorporates a Next‑Latent Prediction objective to compress history into a dense belief state and introduces a RoPE‑based symbol‑retrieval mechanism. On the BabyLM 2026 challenge, the best model ranks 6th overall and 3rd on the NLP‑task subset, outperforming GPT‑2 on most benchmarks and achieving the highest EWoK score among strict‑track entries.

By Adrian Brasoveanu, Ece Takmaz, Jakub Dotla\v{c}il
Hugging Face Trending Papers
5d ago

Not All Thinking is Created Equal: Latent Reasoning Discovers a Recurrent Search Algorithm for Depth Generalization

The paper investigates whether different forms of intermediate computation in large language models—such as token-based traces, pause tokens, and latent reasoning—rely on the same underlying mechanism. By training five variants of GPTNeoX on an extended multi-hop reasoning task, the authors find that while vanilla, Chain-of-Thought, and Pause Token models perform well on in-distribution data, they fail to generalize to longer-hop out-of-distribution problems. In contrast, latent-reasoning models exhibit better depth generalization, with causal analysis revealing a sparse recurrent search circuit that implements forward reachability propagation across the graph.

arXiv AI
Sep 2

Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs

Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT) proposes a method for reasoning with frozen large language models by operating in the model’s continuous representation space. A small auxiliary network generates initial latent vectors, which a tiny recurrent reasoner refines over multiple steps, decoupling computational depth from model size. Experiments on symbolic and natural‑language reasoning tasks show that LRT outperforms prior frozen‑decoder continuous‑space methods and chain‑of‑thought prompting while using far less inference compute.

By Zhaoliang Chen, Jie Fu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Learn Your Own Thoughts: Abstract Token Curriculum

The paper introduces Abstract Token Curriculum (ATC), a curriculum learning framework that enables large language models to develop continuous intermediate representations—referred to as abstract thoughts—without explicit supervision or manual scratchpad design. ATC incrementally raises problem difficulty through a sequence of distributions, guiding models to focus attention on the most informative tokens for predicting subsequent tokens. The authors provide theoretical analysis for parity function learning with single‑layer softmax attention and demonstrate ATC’s effectiveness on graph reachability and arithmetic learning tasks.

By Khashayar Gatmiry, Avrajit Ghosh, Parsa Mirtaheri, Jason D. Lee, Nika Haghtalab, Emmanuel Abbe, Peter Bartlett
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Attention Illuminates LLM Reasoning: The Preplan-and-Anchor Rhythm Enables Fine-Grained Policy Optimization

arXiv:2510. 13554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps.

By Yang Li, Zhichen Dong, Yuhan Sun, Weixun Wang, Shaopan Xiong, Yijia Luo, Jiashun Liu, Han Lu, Jiamang Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng, Junchi Yan