arXiv Machine Learning

Sliding-window beats linear attention

arXiv AI
Jun 11

Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 11634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length.

By Kai Liu, Peijie Dong, Xinchen Xie, Jianfei Gao, Qipeng Guo, Xiaowen Chu, Shaoting Zhang, Kai Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 10

Blurry Window Attention

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 Computation and Language
1d ago

Attention Amnesia in Hybrid LLMs: When CoT Fine-Tuning Breaks Long-Range Recall, and How to Fix It

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