arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Pairwise Attention: Higher-Order Modular Attention for Efficient Sequence Learning

The paper introduces Higher-Order Modular Attention (HOMA), a new attention mechanism that combines standard pairwise self‑attention with an explicit triadic attention pathway. HOMA uses overlapping blocks, local windows, and a low‑rank projection to make triadic interactions tractable. Experiments on controlled PARITY and MATCH3 tasks, as well as TAPE benchmarks, show that HOMA matches or outperforms matched pairwise and purely triadic baselines, especially when dependencies extend beyond triadic order, and it often converges faster and uses parameters more efficiently.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

Attention Routing Stabilizes Early: Working-Set Inference for Recurrent Language Models

The paper investigates how attention dynamics evolve across recurrent depth in language models, finding that attention support stabilizes early while hidden states and outputs take longer. It proposes WISE, a training‑free method that uses full attention in early steps and then reuses the discovered sparse working set for later steps, preserving performance on multi‑hop QA tasks. Experiments show that WISE maintains quality up to 2K context, offers measurable speedups, and highlights the importance of recurrent discovery of attention support.

By Ke Wan, Chen Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

InfoMamba: An Attention-Free Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model

InfoMamba is an attention‑free hybrid model that combines a minimal‑bandwidth global interface with a selective recurrent stream. The architecture replaces token‑level self‑attention with a concept bottleneck linear filtering layer and integrates it via an information‑maximizing fusion (IMF) that injects global context into the state‑space dynamics. Experiments across classification, dense prediction, and non‑vision tasks show that InfoMamba outperforms strong Transformer and SSM baselines while maintaining near‑linear scaling and competitive accuracy‑efficiency trade‑offs.

By Youjin Wang, Jiaqiao Zhao, Rong Fu, Run Zhou, Ruizhe Zhang, Jiani Liang, Suisuai Cao, Feng Zhou
arXiv AI
1d ago

Switching Linear Attention

Switching Linear Attention (SwiLA) is a new sequence layer that improves upon standard softmax attention by maintaining a fixed-size recurrent state while enhancing representational capacity. It derives its recurrence from a test-time regression framework, using online expectation-maximization in a mixture of linear regressions model. In various benchmarks—including associative recall, in-context language learning, and language modeling—SwiLA achieves strong performance, narrowing the gap to softmax attention and even surpassing it in some settings.

By Hyun Dong Lee, Xavier Gonzalez, Nicolas Zucchet, E. Kelly Buchanan, Emily B. Fox, Scott W. Linderman
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 27

RAVE: Re-Allocating Visual Attention in Large Multimodal Models

RAVE (Re-Allocating Visual Attention) is a lightweight pair‑gating mechanism that adds a learned query‑key bias to pre‑softmax attention scores over visual keys, derived from pre‑RoPE query and key features. It requires no architectural changes to the backbone and can be trained end‑to‑end with the rest of the model. Across multiple multimodal benchmarks, RAVE improves standard attention by an average of 3 points, especially on perception‑intensive tasks such as multilingual OCR, chart understanding, document VQA, and scene text VQA.

By Xi Leng, Xinhong Ma, Ziqiang Dong, Feng Zhang, Xiaoying Tang, Yang Yang, Guanjun Jiang