The Evolution of Attention in Large Language Models: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Emerging Trends
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
arXiv:2606. 28876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context language models often conflate two different goals: compressing history into an efficient state, and maintaining reliable long-term memory.
arXiv:2608. 12435v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers owe much of their strong long-context retrieval capability to a token-level memory that grows with context length.
arXiv:2606. 10650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to long contexts is fundamentally constrained by the quadratic complexity of standard attention, motivating the adoption of linear attention mechanisms with sub-quadratic cost.
arXiv:2608. 16844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quadratic cost of attention-based sequence models for long contexts has motivated a growing line of research on memory-based models that can compress context into a compact state.
The paper introduces Memory Attention (MA), a new attention mechanism for language models that replaces the traditional value projection with token-indexed memory combined with contextual keys. MA generates values by merging layer‑specific token memory with contextual information, allowing normalization to be folded into memory tables and reducing value construction to a simple lookup and addition. Experiments show that, with matched training token budgets and additional memory parameters, MA improves language modeling performance and average downstream task results across various attention configurations.
Lngram v2 introduces a latent N‑gram memory system that decouples memory routes, memory dimension, and backbone width, enabling scalable memory capacity for transformers. It employs context‑aware grouped‑query attention, a zero‑value sink, and counterfactual surrogate gradients to improve readout selectivity and routing trainability while preserving hard discrete addressing. Experiments on vision‑language models up to 30B parameters show consistent performance gains, reduced memory parameters, and stable semantic structure in the discrete IDs.