arXiv Machine Learning By Zhibo Yang

Post-Boundary Bridge: Must Local Attention Go Global Between Global Layers?

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

The paper introduces Post-Boundary Bridge (PBB), a hybrid transformer architecture that keeps causal attention within blocks while adding direct connections across block boundaries. PBB focuses on within-block modeling and nearby exchange, delegating long-range communication to full-attention layers. Experiments on dense and mixture-of-experts models ranging from 205 million to 2.07 billion parameters show that PBB hybrids maintain near-full perplexity, competitive downstream performance, and improved source retrieval, while Flash-PBB achieves 1.82× faster decoding with half the local key‑value cache compared to Flash‑SWA.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv Machine Learning.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

HySparse2: Hybrid Sparse Attention with Two-Level KV Sharing

arXiv:2609.26368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon and multi-turn agents typically generate short actions and process long observations from tools and environments. This growing context dem...

By Jianyu Wei, Yizhao Gao, Qihao Zhang, Shimao Chen, Zhengju Tang, Yu Cheng, Shengjie Zhou, Zihan Jiang, Yifan Song, Hailin Zhang, Liang Zhao, Bo Yang, Gang Wang, Shijie Cao, Fuli Luo
arXiv AI
Sep 21

Attention-Aware Routing: Coupling Routing and Attention in MoEs

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.

By Despoina Kosmopoulou, Anastasios Tsetsilas, Efthymios Georgiou, Giannis Karamanolakis, Swastik Roy, Alexandros Potamianos
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 Machine Learning
Jun 16

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

arXiv:2606. 15378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers.

By Ziqing Qiao, Yinuo Xu, Chaojun Xiao, Zhou Su, Zihan Zhou, Yingfa Chen, Xiaoyue Xu, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu