The paper introduces AMOR, an Adaptive Metacognitive Output Router that selectively activates attention in recurrent-attention hybrid models based on predictive uncertainty. By gating attention blocks with an entropy threshold derived from a running batch median and scaled standard deviation, AMOR reduces attention usage to about 40% of positions while achieving superior common-sense reasoning performance across multiple scales. The approach also improves retrieval accuracy over pure recurrent models and maintains long-context robustness, outperforming fixed-schedule hybrids under distribution shift.
arXiv:2607. 07953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-attention lets each token retrieve information from the full context, but its quadratic cost in sequence length limits training and inference at long context.
The paper reports that chain‑of‑thought (CoT) supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) improves reasoning but systematically harms long‑context recall in hybrid linear‑attention models such as HypeNet and Jet‑Nemotron. Retrieval performance on the Needle‑In‑A‑Haystack benchmark drops dramatically after CoT‑SFT, especially with harder settings and longer contexts. The authors introduce QK‑Restore, a training‑free method that reinstates the query‑key projection matrices from the pre‑SFT checkpoint, which recovers long‑range recall while preserving reasoning gains.
Attention-Aware Routing (AAR) augments the router in Mixture-of-Experts language models with temporal and spectral features derived from a sliding window of attention weights, thereby separating contextual information from the token’s hidden state. By keeping the base transformer frozen and training only routing parameters, AAR achieves a +3.37‑point improvement on GSM8K over a routing‑only baseline and demonstrates that routing changes propagate through the residual stream to reshape attention without directly updating the attention mechanism. The method also reduces long diverging generations, shows depth‑sensitivity affecting retrieval versus reasoning, and offers a controlled probe of routing‑relevant information across layers.
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.
arXiv:2608. 15459v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention mechanisms have driven machine learning for a decade, from neural machine translation to language models that do general-purpose reasoning.
arXiv:2607. 19358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in long chain-of-thought reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 have led to increasingly longer inference context lengths under the test-time scaling paradigm.
arXiv:2604. 03444v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention.
arXiv:2609.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training attention sparsification reduces the quadratic cumulative attention cost of pretrained Transformers by selecting a small set of context u...
arXiv:2609.25802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce latest exact match attention (LEMA), an attention variant for transformers where queries and keys are binarized and each query attends onl...
CRISP (Cliff-awaRe Input-adaptive Sparse Prefilling) is a new method for long-context LLM inference that replaces costly quadratic attention prefilling with a dynamic, input-adaptive sparse routing scheme. It introduces a structural proxy, C_struct, to directly read routing decisions from the proxy attention map, eliminating the need for pooled matrix multiplication and KL divergence. Additionally, CRISP addresses the post-softmax mass cliff by using a sink-aware threshold based on the noise floor, theoretically reducing background noise accumulation to O(n). Empirical results on InfiniteBench, RULER, and LongBench show that CRISP outperforms existing sparse methods and can match or exceed exact dense attention, achieving up to a 5.30× speedup at 512k tokens and significant gains on retrieval-heavy tasks.
The paper examines why learned gates in sparse attention models offer little advantage over random gates when jointly trained with the transformer. Through experiments on a 31M-parameter transformer, the authors attribute this to routing absorption, where the model’s representations adapt to the imposed mask, diminishing the benefit of learned routing. They also explore hard masking, stochastic mask training, and the impact of trainable attention layers on gate performance, concluding that freezing the model stabilizes routing targets for effective post‑hoc sparsification.
arXiv:2608. 15065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models produce diverse, sometimes inconsistent answers across repeated queries on the same problem, so multi-sample inference is a prerequisite for reliable deployment.