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:2604. 20920v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention can reduce the cost of long-context inference, but most variants introduce new architectural components.
By Yuzhen Mao, Michael Y. Li, Emily B. Fox
arXiv:2503. 18970v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structured State Space Models (SSMs) have become a prominent class of sequence models, developed against two long-standing difficulties: the sequential computation and gradient propagation limits of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and the quadratic time and memory cost of self-attention in Transformers.
By Shriyank Somvanshi, Md Monzurul Islam, Mahmuda Sultana Mimi, Sazzad Bin Bashar Polock, Gaurab Chhetri, Anandi Dutta, Amir Rafe, Subasish Das
arXiv:2608. 16844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quadratic cost of attention-based sequence models for long contexts has motivated a growing line of research on memory-based models that can compress context into a compact state.
By Reza Bayat, Ali Behrouz, Vahab Mirrokni, Aaron Courville
arXiv:2606. 10650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of standard attention, motivating the adoption of linear attention mechanisms with sub-quadratic cost.
By Xin Wang, Hui Shen, Boyuan Zheng, Xueshen Liu, Minkyoung Cho, Zhongwei Wan, Zesen Zhao, Zhuoqing Mao, Shen Yan, Mi Zhang
arXiv:2608. 12435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers owe much of their strong long-context retrieval capability to a token-level memory that grows with context length.
By Ming Zhang, Kaisen Yang, Shu Yu, Ermo Hua, Ning Ding, Xia Hu, Bowen Zhou, Chaochao Lu, Youbang Sun
arXiv:2607. 06523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context language model inference is increasingly limited by the memory bandwidth and capacity required to store key-value caches, yet existing compression methods often apply uniform budgets across layers or tokens and degrade retrieval when lexical cues and semantic states require different preservation.
By Anna Cordoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesus Olivera
arXiv:2607. 16213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text autoregressively, relying on a key-value (KV) cache whose memory footprint grows linearly with context length, creating a major bottleneck.
By Soumia Bouyahiaoui, Manel Kara laouar, Aicha Boutorh, Mohamed Hadj Ameur
arXiv:2606. 09659v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language model inference is bottlenecked by memory, as the KV cache grows with context length.
By Ang Li, Sean McLeish, Haozhe Chen, Nimit Kalra, Zaiqian Chen, Artem Gazizov, Venkata Anoop Suhas Kumar Morisetty, Bhavya Kailkhura, Harshitha Menon, Zhuang Liu, Brian R. Bartoldson, Tom Goldstein, Sanae Lotfi, Micah Goldblum, Pavel Izmailov
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
arXiv:2607. 25357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context recall in linear-time sequence models highlights a tradeoff in how they write to memory.
By Arshia Afzal, Aviv Bick, Eric P. Xing, Volkan Cevher, Albert Gu
arXiv:2608. 08878v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks, but their Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length, creating a severe memory bottleneck for long-context inference.
By Asaad Althoubi