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.
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.
By Aryuemaan Kumar Chowdhury, Praveen Oosa, Vineesha Reddy
arXiv:2606. 16093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
By Kuzey Torlak, H\"useyin Arda Arslan, An{\i}l Dervi\c{s}o\u{g}lu, Beyza Nur Deniz, Onur Boyar
arXiv:2608.12149v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies:...
By Zunhai Su, Bohan Sun, Xialie Zhuang, Shuibai Zhang, He Xiao, Jing Xiong, Hengyuan Zhang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tiantian Zhang, Ngai Wong, Chuan-Wei Kuo
arXiv:2607. 20484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are fundamentally limited by representation collapse, a bottleneck that severely degrades long-context performance.
By Yiheng Tao, Kaiwen Cheng, Yao Lu, Chang Liu, Jie Chen
We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies: MAs consistently spike immediately before full attention layers, forming pre-attention spikes (PAS), and can persist through intervening linear attention layers, giving rise to inter-spike plateaus (ISP). As full attention becomes denser, successive PAS become increasingly connected through ISP, ultimately recovering the stable MA morphology of full attention LLMs.
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.
By Habibullah Akbar
The paper introduces TANGO, a new Transformer variant that replaces the standard self‑attention and feed‑forward sublayers with a single cross‑token gated residual update. Each token generates a SwiGLU gate, and query‑key similarities weight these gates to rescale destination features, yielding a quadratic‑time model. A windowed variant, WANGO, limits the gated interactions to a recent window and uses prefix statistics for older tokens, achieving linear‑time complexity while maintaining competitive performance.
By Joshua Nunley
arXiv:2608.30320v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We describe the architecture and ablations of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 125B parameters, 6B activated per token, and a...
By Zihan Qiu, Zekun Wang, Xiao Li, Yanpeng Li, Yang Xu, Yixuan Wang, Huaqing Zhang, Rui Men, Bochao Mao, Chengruidong Zhang, Fan Zhou, Hao Luo, Haofeng Huang, Haoran Lian, Haoyan Huang, Hongqing Chen, Jianwei Zhang, Jing Xu, Junjie Wang, Langshi Chen, Liangyu Wang, Linlang Jiang, Man Yuan, Minmin Sun, Peng Jin, Siqi Zhang, Siyu Wang, Xingzhang Ren, Yakai Wang, Yi Zhang, Yiming Dong, Yizhong Cao, Yubo Ma, Yunfei Mao, Bo Zheng, Dayiheng Liu
TinyCeNN-LM proposes a quality‑gated post‑training conversion framework that replaces attention in pretrained language models with CeNN‑inspired cellular‑recurrent layers. The method includes bounded local processing, compact recurrent memory, routing, fusion, and an accept‑or‑rollback validation step, with three specific implementations studied. Experiments on SmolLM2‑135M and Qwen3.5‑0.8B show that the conversion can accept certain layers while rejecting others based on representation fidelity and NLL thresholds, achieving minimal perplexity changes and modest downstream accuracy retention.
By Kabeh Mohsenzadegan, Vahid Tavakkoli, Kyandoghere Kyamakya
arXiv:2603. 22473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hybrid language models combine softmax attention with linear-time sequence mechanisms such as state-space or linear-attention layers, but the functional contribution of each component type remains insufficiently characterized.
By Hector Borobia, Elies Segu\'i-Mas, Guillermina Tormo-Carb\'o
Lngram v2 introduces a latent N‑gram memory system that decouples memory routes, memory dimension, and backbone width, enabling scalable memory capacity for transformers. It employs context‑aware grouped‑query attention, a zero‑value sink, and counterfactual surrogate gradients to improve readout selectivity and routing trainability while preserving hard discrete addressing. Experiments on vision‑language models up to 30B parameters show consistent performance gains, reduced memory parameters, and stable semantic structure in the discrete IDs.
By Yunao Zheng, Bin Wen, Xiaojie Wang