arXiv Machine Learning By Zeyi Huang, Xuehai He, Yong Jae Lee, Yelong Shen

Trading Depth for Time in Recurrent Transformers

Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →

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.

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 Machine Learning
Aug 27

Gated Recurrent Transformers: Expressive Depth through Recurrent Modulation

The paper introduces Gated Recurrent Transformers, a depth‑sharing architecture that brackets a single shared core with fixed prelude and coda blocks and uses a lightweight projection and element‑wise update gate to modulate recurrent updates. This design allows functional specialization across recurrences while reducing memory footprint. Experiments show that, under equal FLOPs or parameter budgets, the recurrent model matches or surpasses deeper GPT‑2 Small baselines, achieving similar or better accuracy with fewer parameters and lower peak decoding memory.

By Amr Hegazy, Amr Alanwar, Mostafa Elhoushi