arXiv:2608. 14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models in the ten to one hundred million parameter range are attractive for on device inference, rapid experimentation, and controlled scientific study, yet most of them reuse the standard transformer block without adaptation to the small scale regime.
arXiv:2505. 15548v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive transformer language models frequently exhibit training instability when trained on long sequences, particularly under low-precision arithmetic.
arXiv:2607. 01394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Wiola, a fully original Small Language Model (SLM) architecture built from first principles, sharing no structural lineage with any existing model family including GPT, LLaMA, Mistral, or Falcon.
Scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) has been driven mainly by enlarging the Transformer backbone, but for an already-strong model this requires another round of costly pretraining. We study whether an existing backbone can keep improving by allocating more computation to each token while leaving the Transformer backbone fixed.
The paper introduces NAMOH, a native sparse attention mechanism that activates only a subset of heads per token, allowing each head to attend to a limited subsequence of tokens. By scaling the number of heads while keeping the active heads per token fixed, the method shortens head histories and reduces key‑value access without increasing overall storage. Experiments demonstrate that NAMOH can outperform fully activated models with the same parameter count and enable more efficient long‑context inference than smaller dense models.
arXiv:2606. 16093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
We present Wiola, a fully original Small Language Model (SLM) architecture built from first principles, sharing no structural lineage with any existing model family including GPT, LLaMA, Mistral, or Falcon. Wiola introduces five independently novel components: (i) Spiral Rotary Positional Encoding (SRPE), which embeds token positions on a three-dimensional helical manifold combining absolute, relative, and hierarchical positional signals; (ii) Gated Cross-Layer Attention (GCLA), providing each decoder layer with soft cross-attention access to compressed summaries of two preceding layers for inter-layer coherence; (iii) Adaptive Token Merging (ATM), which dynamically merges se mantically redundant adjacent tokens in middle network layers to reduce attention complexity without information loss; (iv) Dual Stream Feed-Forward (DSFF), replacing the conventional MLP with two parallel streams fused by a learned per-dimension gate; and (v) WiolaRMSNorm, a modified normalisation introducing a per-dimension learned offset vector that prevents representation collapse.
The paper proposes a lightweight recurrent memory module inserted between the lower and upper halves of a 6‑layer decoder‑only transformer. This module, which uses cross‑attention to observe hidden states, a GRU to update a persistent state, and gated addition to modulate subsequent layers, adds only 3.7% more parameters. It reduces evaluation loss by 28.5% and narrows the generalization gap, with ablations showing the benefit comes solely from the memory topology rather than auxiliary losses.
arXiv:2601.06787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to contain significant redundancy, yet a systematic explanation for why certain components, particularly in...
arXiv:2607. 09052v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block sparse attention is a hardware friendly way to alleviate the key-value (KV) cache read bottleneck in large language models (LLMs).
arXiv:2502. 08363v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Top-Theta (Top-$\theta$) Attention, a training-free method for sparsifying transformer attention during inference.
The paper proposes a new architecture for masked language modeling that replaces the Transformer attention mechanism with a stack of low‑rank bottleneck autoencoders. Each autoencoder mixes information locally, across the full sequence, and across attention heads, compressing and reconstructing inputs without training‑dependent width. An iterative refinement process at masked positions pulls embeddings toward a weighted neighbor average and then projects them back onto the learned manifold, achieving comparable performance to BERT with roughly 1.9× fewer FLOPs and matching BERT on rare‑token performance through a frequency‑aware training schedule.
arXiv:2606. 25156v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Native length extrapolation remain a weakly solvable problem in language modeling due to trade-off balancing between exact retrieval fidelity, long-document likelihood, and inference efficiency.