Multilinguality in Hybrid Attention LLMs

The paper investigates how hybrid attention mechanisms—combining full softmax attention with recurrent alternatives—affect multilingual language models, especially for long sequences and poorly tokenized languages. Interpretability analysis reveals that cross‑lingual representations form patterns linked to the ordering of recurrent and full‑attention layers, with a notable spike in alignment after the first full‑attention layer. Distillation experiments show that alternative layer orderings consistently outperform the standard arrangement, achieving up to 2.5× faster learning, suggesting that starting with a full‑attention layer may benefit multilingual models.

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