RecurrentGPT: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation in Transformers
arXiv:2608. 15062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency.
arXiv:2607. 13491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Looped Transformers scale sequential computation by applying a compact stack of physical blocks for multiple rounds, increasing unrolled depth without increasing stored parameters.
arXiv:2608. 15062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency.
arXiv:2606. 16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth.
arXiv:2608.15062v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency. While unique weights across layer...
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.
arXiv:2606. 01495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present CART (Context-Anchored Recurrent Transformer), a parameter-efficient language model that reuses a single shared core block R times across depth.
arXiv:2606. 26538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep Transformers are composed of uniformly stacked residual blocks, yet their deepest layers often add little value.
The paper critiques the common practice of evaluating depth usage in depth‑recurrent language models by truncating depth during inference and measuring performance decline. It argues that this method conflates three distinct effects—fewer block applications, reduced computation, and an out‑of‑distribution readout—yet is usually interpreted as measuring only the second. To address this, the authors introduce the Depth Control Protocol (DCP), a suite of positive and negative controls that isolate each factor, along with a training intervention to confirm causality, specifically tailored for depth‑wise weight‑sharing architectures.
arXiv:2602. 07494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deeper modern architectures are costly to train, making hyperparameter transfer preferable to expensive repeated tuning.
arXiv:2606. 18524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped (weight-tied) Transformers apply a shared residual block $N$ times ($h \leftarrow h + \varepsilon\,f(h)$, same $f$ at each step), increasing effective depth without adding parameters.
The paper introduces LOOM, a method for scaling looped mixture‑of‑experts (MoE) Transformers beyond the typical two‑loop limit. LOOM addresses two key obstacles: it stabilizes deep recurrence by bounding residual variance and re‑injecting the input embedding, and it prevents expert selection collapse by using per‑loop routers and a looping residual to maintain computational diversity. Experiments on 100 M–1.7 B parameter models show stable scaling to 9–12 loops, with significant perplexity reductions and zero‑shot accuracy gains under near‑iso‑FLOP conditions.
arXiv:2607. 14018v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization.
arXiv:2606. 24898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped language models turn hidden states into runtime state: each state is decoded for prediction and fed back into future computation.