The paper introduces the concept of a free pause token, which allows a language model to perform additional computation for each next-token prediction without increasing the sequence length or KV cache usage. This pause token operates as a parallel prediction stream over a shared backbone, improving next-token accuracy by 2–3 centi‑nats on a 1‑billion‑parameter model. While it adds minimal inference overhead, the primary cost lies in training, where compute requirements rise modestly (up to 1.14×) yet most benefits are retained.
By John Langford, Nathan Godey, Giovanni Monea, Yoav Artzi, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Zheng Zhan
arXiv:2608.21308v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Test-Time Training (TTT) enables long-context processing via continuous weight updates during inference, but current methods struggle to balance the ex...
By Zeyun Zhong, Joya Chen, Manuel Martin, Frederik Diederichs, Juergen Gall, Juergen Beyerer
arXiv:2607. 14427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A depth-recurrent transformer applies a weight-tied core a variable number of times, and prior work has shown that training with a randomized recursion count yields one checkpoint usable across a range of inference depths.
By Joe Logan
The paper introduces LoopCD, a training‑free contrastive decoding framework that improves token selection in Loop‑Transformer models by comparing the final prediction with earlier recurrent passes. LoopCD operates either in logit space (LoopCD‑Logits) with a single extra output pass or in hidden‑state space (LoopCD‑Hidden) with no output overhead. Across multiple looped Transformer families, LoopCD yields significant performance gains—raising pass@1 scores on tasks such as AIME 2024 and HumanEval—while enabling a reduction in the number of recurrent loops and a corresponding decrease in inference FLOPs.
By Weihao Liu, Huangjie Zheng, Tianrong Chen, Rohit Dilip, Richard He Bai, Yizhu Jiao, Yuyang Wang, Ruixiang Zhang
arXiv:2607. 01218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformers use the same forward computation stream to both predict the next token and store useful state for future token predictions.
By Giovanni Monea, Nathan Godey, Kiant\'e Brantley, Yoav Artzi
The paper introduces CHASE, a cache‑hole‑adapted skip‑exit mechanism for looped state‑space language models, specifically Looped Mamba and Looped Hybrid Mamba‑Transformer. It shows that looping these architectures improves performance on controlled reasoning tasks and remains competitive in pre‑training benchmarks while using fewer distinct parameters. The cache‑hole adaptation allows selective skipping of recurrent steps during inference, maintaining perplexity close to full computation and achieving significant speedups.
By Zhenxuan Yu, Takeshi Kojima, Yutaka Matsuo, Yusuke Iwasawa