arXiv AI
Oct 1

Synthetic Pre-pretraining Survives Scale, but Not as a Grammatical Prior

The study evaluates synthetic pre‑pretraining (PPT) across a wide range of models (500 M–7 B parameters) and training budgets (up to 100 B tokens). Results show that PPT consistently improves downstream performance and token efficiency, saving at least 21 B tokens at the 3 B scale, but these gains do not appear to stem from a grammatical prior. Instead, PPT benefits arise from tasks that enhance long‑range retrieval, and the improvements remain robust across diverse data mixtures, diminishing only when web text is omitted.

By Atsuki Yamaguchi, Tatsuro Inaba, Joel Niklaus, Michal \v{S}tef\'anik, Aline Villavicencio, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Sliding-window beats linear attention

arXiv:2608.28444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Due to the nature of quadratic attention, Large Language Models (LLMs) consume a lot of memory and energy. Every new token costs more than the previo...

By Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker, Pashmina Cameron, Emy Gervais
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos
arXiv AI
Oct 12

MS-GLA: Multi-Scale Gated Linear Attention for Addressing Representational Bottlenecks via Multi-Temporal Resolution

MS-GLA introduces Multi-Scale Gated Linear Attention, distributing attention heads across multiple temporal resolutions to address representational bottlenecks in GLA Transformers. Coarser resolutions pool longer token spans for long‑range dependencies, while finer heads capture local syntax, and a learnable fusion layer recombines outputs dynamically. Experiments on language modeling, recall‑intensive tasks, and long‑context generalization show MS‑GLA outperforms GLA with up to 18.9% improvement on recall tasks and 9.5% lower perplexity on language modeling benchmarks.

By Prasoon Dev, Anirudh Sankar, Vasudeva Varma
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

No Single Tokenizer Feature Reliably Predicts Downstream Language Model Performance

The paper investigates whether intrinsic tokenizer features can predict the performance of downstream language models. By training about 200 models across nine languages and evaluating numerous tokenizer metrics, the authors find that none of the existing metrics consistently forecasts model performance across different families, tasks, and languages. They propose a new linguistically grounded metric that captures aspects of tokenizer quality missed by prior measures, though its predictive power may still vary.

By Antonio Lopardo, Luis Frentzen Salim, Shikhar Srivastava, Kevin Jiang, Mridul Sharma, Catherine Arnett