arXiv Machine Learning By Michael C. Mozer, Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Rosanne Liu

The Topological Trouble With Transformers

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arXiv:2604. 17121v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers encode structure in sequences via an expanding contextual history.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Recirculation

The paper introduces recirculation, an inference‑time architectural enhancement for foundation models that reduces perplexity and improves accuracy on generation and reasoning tasks without adding significant latency. Recirculation adds a specific form of recurrence, enabling the model to function as a dynamical system that tracks belief states, and is distinct from chain‑of‑thought or depth‑recurrence methods. An adaptive variant requires minimal hyperparameter tuning and achieves notable gains on the Gemma3 family, including a 23% perplexity drop and a 21% accuracy increase on GSM8k.

By Michael C. Mozer, Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Danny Sawyer, Sunny Sanyal, Rosanne Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Trading Depth for Time in Recurrent Transformers

The paper investigates whether extra computation in recurrent Transformers should be allocated to more temporal steps or greater physical depth. Using Latent Recurrent Transformers (LRTs), the authors insert a latent thought token between vocabulary tokens, allowing each token to pass through the same $L$ layers twice while sharing parameters. Experiments on 16‑ and 20‑layer mixture‑of‑experts NanoChat backbones show that a single thought token brings a shallower model within 0.006–0.004 bits per byte of a double‑depth counterpart, recovering 67–81% of the improvement with roughly 48% fewer parameters.

By Zeyi Huang, Xuehai He, Yong Jae Lee, Yelong Shen