arXiv Computation and Language

The Evolution of Attention in Large Language Models: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Emerging Trends

arXiv AI
Jun 10

Dynamic Linear Attention

arXiv:2606. 10650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of standard attention, motivating the adoption of linear attention mechanisms with sub-quadratic cost.

By Xin Wang, Hui Shen, Boyuan Zheng, Xueshen Liu, Minkyoung Cho, Zhongwei Wan, Zesen Zhao, Zhuoqing Mao, Shen Yan, Mi Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Memory Attention

The paper introduces Memory Attention (MA), a new attention mechanism for language models that replaces the traditional value projection with token-indexed memory combined with contextual keys. MA generates values by merging layer‑specific token memory with contextual information, allowing normalization to be folded into memory tables and reducing value construction to a simple lookup and addition. Experiments show that, with matched training token budgets and additional memory parameters, MA improves language modeling performance and average downstream task results across various attention configurations.

By Jiale Kang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Lngram v2: Latent N-Gram Memory with Interpretable Discrete Representations

Lngram v2 introduces a latent N‑gram memory system that decouples memory routes, memory dimension, and backbone width, enabling scalable memory capacity for transformers. It employs context‑aware grouped‑query attention, a zero‑value sink, and counterfactual surrogate gradients to improve readout selectivity and routing trainability while preserving hard discrete addressing. Experiments on vision‑language models up to 30B parameters show consistent performance gains, reduced memory parameters, and stable semantic structure in the discrete IDs.

By Yunao Zheng, Bin Wen, Xiaojie Wang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

Dynamic Linear Attention

The scalability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of standard attention, motivating the adoption of linear attention mechanisms with sub-quadratic cost. To improve representation capacity under long contexts, recent approaches organize memory in a multi-state manner.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 23

Memory Attention

Language models typically construct attention values from contextual hidden states, even when some of their content may be reusable across contexts. We investigate whether token-indexed memory can rep...