Switching Linear Attention (SwiLA) is a new sequence layer that improves upon standard softmax attention by maintaining a fixed-size recurrent state while enhancing representational capacity. It derives its recurrence from a test-time regression framework, using online expectation-maximization in a mixture of linear regressions model. In various benchmarks—including associative recall, in-context language learning, and language modeling—SwiLA achieves strong performance, narrowing the gap to softmax attention and even surpassing it in some settings.
By Hyun Dong Lee, Xavier Gonzalez, Nicolas Zucchet, E. Kelly Buchanan, Emily B. Fox, Scott W. Linderman
arXiv:2606. 01294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention by maintaining a recurrent fast-weight state, but it consistently lags on in-context retrieval and long-context tasks.
By Dong Le, Thong Nguyen, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Anh Tuan Luu
arXiv:2607. 07953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-attention lets each token retrieve information from the full context, but its quadratic cost in sequence length limits training and inference at long context.
By Tommaso Cerruti, Tim Rieder, George Rowlands, Lingfeng Jin, Imanol Schlag
arXiv:2601. 11667v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment.
By Xiaojie Xia, Huigang Zhang, Chaoliang Zhong, Jun Sun, Yusuke Oishi
arXiv:2605. 09778v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating softmax attention over a fixed long context requires reading every cached key-value pair for each new query token.
By Jo\~ao Monteiro, Michal Klein, Pierre Ablin, Marco Cuturi
arXiv:2506. 08297v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Attention is the critical component of a transformer.
By Nhat Thanh Tran, Fanghui Xue, Shuai Zhang, Jiancheng Lyu, Yunling Zheng, Yingyong Qi, Jack Xin
arXiv:2604. 24432v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long-context ability, has become one of the most important iteration direction of next-generation Large Language Models, particularly in semantic understanding/reasoning, code agentic intelligence and recommendation system.
By Chenglong Chu, Guorui Zhou, Guowang Zhang, Han Li, Hao Peng, Hongtao Cheng, Hui Wang, Jian Liang, Jiangxia Cao, Kun Gai, Lingzhi Zhou, Lu Ren, Qi Zhang, Ruiming Tang, Ruitao Wang, Xinchen Luo, Yi Su, Zhiyuan Liang, Ziqi Wang, Boyang Ding, Chengru Song, Dunju Zang, Jiao Ou, Jiaxin Deng, Jijun Shi, Jinghao Zhang, Junmin Chen, Lejian Ren, Minxuan Lv, Qianqian Wang, Qigen Hu, Shiyao Wang, Siyang Mao, Tao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Zhixin Ling, Ziming Li, Zixing Zhang
arXiv:2512. 11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis.
By Etienne Boursier, Claire Boyer
arXiv:2609.13141v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context u...
By Zhiwei Li, Lei Zhu, Hao Gu, Xiang Hu, Yan Wang, Haitao Mi, Sirui Han, Leo Liang, Zhijiang Guo
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. 19358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in long chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 have led to increasingly longer inference context lengths under the test-time scaling paradigm.
By Yu Zhao, Zekun Zhang, Fan Jiang, Bo Zeng, Linlong Xu, Shimin Shan, Yu Liu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
arXiv:2602.04852v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Linear attention offers a computationally efficient yet expressive alternative to softmax attention. However, recent empirical results indicate tha...
By Philipp Nazari, T. Konstantin Rusch