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:2506. 05233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequence modeling is currently dominated by causal transformer architectures that use softmax self-attention.
By Johannes von Oswald, Nino Scherrer, Seijin Kobayashi, Luca Versari, Songlin Yang, Sarthak Mittal, Maximilian Schlegel, Kaitlin Maile, Yanick Schimpf, Oliver Sieberling, Alexander Meulemans, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie, Charlotte Frenkel, Razvan Pascanu, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento
arXiv:2604. 01577v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study out of distribution generalization in streaming tasks where models are trained on short sequences but must operate over much longer, unknown horizons under bounded memory.
By Shota Takashiro, Masanori Koyama, Takeru Miyato, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Kohei Hayashi
arXiv:2606. 06479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training recurrent neural networks (RNNs) requires assigning credit across long sequences of computations.
By Akarsh Kumar, Phillip Isola
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:2605.26797v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We study Latent Recurrent Transformer (LRT), a lightweight augmentation of autoregressive transformers that reuses a high-level source-layer hidden...
By Zeyi Huang, Xuehai He, LiLiang Ren, Yiping Wang, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Shuohang Wang, Pengcheng He, Jianfeng Gao, Yong Jae Lee, Yelong Shen