arXiv Computation and Language

Asymmetric Looped Transformers: Fixed Global Representations for an Iterative Decoder

The Asymmetric Looped Transformer (AsymLoop) separates context encoding from state refinement by using a single-pass causal encoder to produce fixed global key-value caches and a weight-tied recurrent decoder to generate local key-values from its evolving state. Joint attention over both sources allows each update to combine persistent contextual information with the current intermediate state. Experiments on FineWeb-Edu across models from 60M to 1B show lower validation perplexity and higher downstream accuracy than full-loop models, with a 1B model improving zero-shot commonsense reasoning accuracy from 49.58% to 50.85%.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation

The paper introduces Gated Recurrent Transformers, a depth‑sharing architecture that brackets a single shared core with fixed prelude and coda blocks and uses a lightweight projection and element‑wise update gate to modulate recurrent updates. This design allows functional specialization across recurrences while reducing memory footprint. Experiments show that, under equal FLOPs or parameter budgets, the recurrent model matches or surpasses deeper GPT‑2 Small baselines, achieving similar or better accuracy with fewer parameters and lower peak decoding memory.

By Amr Hegazy, Amr Alanwar, Mostafa Elhoushi
arXiv AI
Jun 29

The Context-Ready Transformer

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

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 AI
Oct 19

Prism Attention: Proposal-Refined Index Sharing Mechanism for Efficient LLMs Inference

Prism Attention introduces a proposal‑refined sparse attention framework that replaces static cross‑layer index reuse with a coarse‑to‑fine strategy, allowing layer‑wise adaptability while maintaining efficiency. The method leverages the observation that high‑attention tokens remain largely stable across layers, with changes concentrated near the boundary of previously selected regions. Experiments demonstrate state‑of‑the‑art performance on reasoning and long‑context benchmarks, achieving a 3.4× decoding speedup over FlashAttention at 128K context length.

By Zhenxu Tian, Kebin Liu, Zhengwu Yang, Yi Su, Qingqing Dang, Yanlin Sha, Kaipeng Deng, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
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
Sep 30

Scheduling Recursive Reasoning in Looped Transformers

arXiv:2609.36653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent reasoning models have attracted growing attention for scaling test-time computation, typically by iteratively refining latent states with sha...

By Boyuan Wang, Chengyao Yu, Jiaxi Ren, Hongxin Wei, Bingyi Jing, Yuxin Tao
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Towards Looped Models Done Right, Part I: Topology, Input Injection, Recurrent-State Design

The paper investigates looped language models that reuse Transformer blocks across logical depth, separating recurrence placement, input injection, and recurrent state design. Experiments at matched parameter scale, logical depth, and token budgets show that a prelude‑recurrent‑block‑coda architecture improves context extraction and reasoning, while input injection boosts knowledge retrieval. The Huginn‑style design, especially at 730 M parameters and 336 B tokens, outperforms the Ouro architecture on all ten benchmarks, and its advantages transfer to Mixture‑of‑Experts models, achieving superior performance with fewer resident parameters.

By Benhao Huang, Chufan Shi, Junlin Chen, Shicheng Wen, Zhengzhong Liu, Eric Xing, Xuezhe Ma
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Manifold Projection and Iterative Autoencoder Refinement for Masked Language Modeling

The paper proposes a new architecture for masked language modeling that replaces the Transformer attention mechanism with a stack of low‑rank bottleneck autoencoders. Each autoencoder mixes information locally, across the full sequence, and across attention heads, compressing and reconstructing inputs without training‑dependent width. An iterative refinement process at masked positions pulls embeddings toward a weighted neighbor average and then projects them back onto the learned manifold, achieving comparable performance to BERT with roughly 1.9× fewer FLOPs and matching BERT on rare‑token performance through a frequency‑aware training schedule.

By Narges Mokhtari, Farzan Haddadi, Ebrahim Rezaii