Modern language models are built primarily from Transformers, recurrent models, and their hybrid architectures. Transformers rely on token-level attention memories, while recurrent models such as state space models (SSMs) and linear attention maintain compact recurrent states.
arXiv:2606. 09862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Softmax Attention operation in Transformer language models has a quadratic complexity in the sequence length and a growing state size in the form of KV cache, which becomes a bottleneck in long context scenarios.
By Axel Laborieux, Christos Sourmpis, Juan Gabriel Kostelec, Qinghai Guo
arXiv:2608. 02032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern language models are built primarily from Transformers, recurrent models, and their hybrid architectures.
By Yixiao Qian, Song Chen, Pengkai Wang, Jiaxu Liu, Shengze Cai, Chao Xu
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:2607. 02303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear-attention and state-space language models compress the prefix into a fixed-size recurrent state, yielding O(1) memory at the cost of a lossy exact memory: when many key--value associations compete, earlier facts are overwritten and needle recall degrades.
By Wanyun Cui
Linear-attention and state-space language models compress the prefix into a fixed-size recurrent state, yielding O(1) memory at the cost of a lossy exact memory: when many key--value associations compete, earlier facts are overwritten and needle recall degrades. Inspired by Complementary Learning Systems, we give linear attention a hippocampal complement.
arXiv:2606. 25156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern large language models based on softmax scaled-dot-product attention are constrained by their training sequence length: as the key-value sequence grows, softmax probability mass can dilute across a wider distribution, inducing activation shift and long-context performance collapse.
By Habibullah Akbar
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:2605. 25475v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly expected to operate over long contexts, yet standard softmax attention incurs a KV cache that grows linearly with sequence length, quickly becoming the bottleneck for long context inference.
By Xintong Yang, Hao Gu, Binxing Xu, Lujun Li, Bei Liu, Jiacheng Liu, Qiyuan Zhu, Yike Guo, Sirui Han
The paper reports that chain‑of‑thought (CoT) supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) improves reasoning but systematically harms long‑context recall in hybrid linear‑attention models such as HypeNet and Jet‑Nemotron. Retrieval performance on the Needle‑In‑A‑Haystack benchmark drops dramatically after CoT‑SFT, especially with harder settings and longer contexts. The authors introduce QK‑Restore, a training‑free method that reinstates the query‑key projection matrices from the pre‑SFT checkpoint, which recovers long‑range recall while preserving reasoning gains.
By Xinyu Zhou, Boyu Zhu, Yi Xu, Zhiwei Li, Yingfa Chen, Huiming Wang, Zhijiang Guo
arXiv:2606. 18587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens.
By Zhiyuan Wang, Xuan Luo, Sirui Zeng, Xifeng Yan
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