arXiv:2607. 18759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers with relative positional encodings often extrapolate to sequences longer than those seen during training, whereas transformers with learned absolute encodings typically do not.
By Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut
arXiv:2512. 14391v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning is fundamental to modern Large Language Models (LLMs); however, prevailing architectures impose a rigid and fixed contextual structure by assigning linear or constant positional indices.
By Huayang Li, Tianyu Zhao, Deng Cai, Richard Sproat
The paper proposes an encoder Transformer that explicitly separates semantic, absolute positional (AP), and relative positional (RP) information, restricting the masked‑language‑modeling objective to the semantic stream. This disentanglement reveals that the AP subspace collapses into a low‑frequency two‑dimensional manifold reflecting document structure, that attention heads specialize into structure‑ and semantic‑oriented groups with RP supporting only the latter, and that standard positional encodings fail to robustly encode macroscopic structure. The approach preserves positional encoding and improves performance on 49 out of 65 linguistic phenomena in the Flash‑Holmes probing benchmark.
By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Camille Barboule, Benjamin Piwowarski
arXiv:2606. 18587v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens.
By Zhiyuan Wang, Xuan Luo, Sirui Zeng, Xifeng Yan
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.
By Zizhuo Fu, Runsheng Wang, Meng Li
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.
By Suvadeep Hajra
arXiv:2603. 06591v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers frequently allocate disproportionate attention to specific tokens, a phenomenon known as attention sinks.
By Runyu Peng, Ruixiao Li, Mingshu Chen, Yunhua Zhou, Qipeng Guo, Xipeng Qiu, Yucheng Lu, Chen Zhao
arXiv:2604. 22128v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering.
By Aryan Sharma, Cutter Dawes, Shivam Raval
arXiv:2509. 10534v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The attention mechanism in a Transformer architecture matches key to query based on both content -- the what -- and position in a sequence -- the where.
By Anand Gopalakrishnan, Robert Csord\'as, J\"urgen Schmidhuber, Michael C. Mozer
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:2609.38530v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language models increasingly use architectures that vary attention span and positional encoding across layers, such as applying RoPE with sliding-windo...
By Eric Enouen, Sainyam Galhotra
arXiv:2511. 17388v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Position information is essential for language modeling.
By Sajad Movahedi, Timur Carstensen, Arshia Afzal, Frank Hutter, Antonio Orvieto, Volkan Cevher