arXiv AI By Hyun Dong Lee, Xavier Gonzalez, Nicolas Zucchet, E. Kelly Buchanan, Emily B. Fox, Scott W. Linderman

Switching Linear Attention

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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.

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