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.
arXiv:2605.26797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Latent Recurrent Transformer (LRT), a lightweight augmentation of autoregressive transformers that reuses a high-level source-layer hidden...
arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.
The paper introduces Gated Recurrent Transformers, a depth‑sharing architecture that brackets a single shared core with fixed prelude and coda blocks and uses a lightweight projection and element‑wise update gate to modulate recurrent updates. This design allows functional specialization across recurrences while reducing memory footprint. Experiments show that, under equal FLOPs or parameter budgets, the recurrent model matches or surpasses deeper GPT‑2 Small baselines, achieving similar or better accuracy with fewer parameters and lower peak decoding memory.
arXiv:2608.15062v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency. While unique weights across layer...
arXiv:2606. 16093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
The paper investigates how to effectively pre‑train language models when the data budget is limited but compute is plentiful. It shows that increasing model size only improves performance up to an optimal point, after which overfitting degrades generalization, and that this optimal size varies with both the data budget and downstream tasks. To overcome the inefficiencies of standard Transformers in this regime, the authors propose recursive Transformers that reuse a shared block across depth and employ factorized embeddings, achieving better results than standard models on 10M–100M word pre‑training budgets and competitive performance with BabyLM Challenge 2025 winners.
arXiv:2608. 15062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling transformer language models creates an inherent tension between expressivity and memory efficiency.
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:2606.10537v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) re-encode the entire prefix at every denoising step, causing recomputation that scales quadratically with...
arXiv:2605. 08696v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Over the last two decades, language modeling has experienced a shift from the use of predominantly recurrent architectures that process tokens sequentially during training and inference to non-recurrent models that process sequence elements in parallel during training, which results in greater training efficiency and stability at the expense of lower inference throughput.
arXiv:2606. 09659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length.
Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length. Recent techniques to compress the KV cache fall short: they either degrade model quality substantially or require considerable time and compute to compress a single long prompt.