We present Wiola, a fully original Small Language Model (SLM) architecture built from first principles, sharing no structural lineage with any existing model family including GPT, LLaMA, Mistral, or Falcon. Wiola introduces five independently novel components: (i) Spiral Rotary Positional Encoding (SRPE), which embeds token positions on a three-dimensional helical manifold combining absolute, relative, and hierarchical positional signals; (ii) Gated Cross-Layer Attention (GCLA), providing each decoder layer with soft cross-attention access to compressed summaries of two preceding layers for inter-layer coherence; (iii) Adaptive Token Merging (ATM), which dynamically merges se mantically redundant adjacent tokens in middle network layers to reduce attention complexity without information loss; (iv) Dual Stream Feed-Forward (DSFF), replacing the conventional MLP with two parallel streams fused by a learned per-dimension gate; and (v) WiolaRMSNorm, a modified normalisation introducing a per-dimension learned offset vector that prevents representation collapse.
arXiv:2608. 14604v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small language models in the ten to one hundred million parameter range are attractive for on device inference, rapid experimentation, and controlled scientific study, yet most of them reuse the standard transformer block without adaptation to the small scale regime.
By Aryuemaan Kumar Chowdhury, Praveen Oosa, Vineesha Reddy
arXiv:2606. 16093v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-range dependencies remains a central challenge in natural language processing.
By Kuzey Torlak, H\"useyin Arda Arslan, An{\i}l Dervi\c{s}o\u{g}lu, Beyza Nur Deniz, Onur Boyar
arXiv:2608.12149v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies:...
By Zunhai Su, Bohan Sun, Xialie Zhuang, Shuibai Zhang, He Xiao, Jing Xiong, Hengyuan Zhang, Zhongzhu Zhou, Tiantian Zhang, Ngai Wong, Chuan-Wei Kuo
arXiv:2607. 20484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are fundamentally limited by representation collapse, a bottleneck that severely degrades long-context performance.
By Yiheng Tao, Kaiwen Cheng, Yao Lu, Chang Liu, Jie Chen
We present the first systematic study of Massive activations (MAs) in layer-interleaved HLA LLMs and uncover two architecture-aligned morphologies: MAs consistently spike immediately before full attention layers, forming pre-attention spikes (PAS), and can persist through intervening linear attention layers, giving rise to inter-spike plateaus (ISP). As full attention becomes denser, successive PAS become increasingly connected through ISP, ultimately recovering the stable MA morphology of full attention LLMs.