arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 21

Interdomain Attention: Beyond Token-Level Key-Value Memory

The paper introduces Interdomain Attention (IA), a hybrid architecture that blends softmax attention with recurrent memory within a single layer, leveraging a kernel regression perspective to compress keys and values into a state‑space model (SSM) memory. IA reconstructs the attention matrix implicitly from memory states, preserving the computational efficiency of SSMs while achieving performance gains. Experiments on models ranging from 125 M to 1.3 B parameters show IA surpasses an S4D baseline at matched memory size, outperforms standard Transformers on perplexity and common‑sense reasoning, and matches or exceeds SSM‑based models on genomic downstream tasks.

By Naoki Kiyohara, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Riccardo El Hassanin, Zhuo Sun, Wenlong Chen, Samir Bhatt, Yingzhen Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

SimpleDesign: A Joint Model for Protein Sequence and Structure Codesign

SimpleDesign is a single-stage, end-to-end model for joint protein sequence and structure design that eliminates the need for multi-stage training. It combines discrete cross-entropy for sequences with a regression objective for structures, using a Mixture-of-Transformer architecture to handle modality-specific processing while maintaining global self-attention. Trained on over 2 million sequence-structure pairs, SimpleDesign achieves strong performance on co-design and unconditional generation benchmarks.

By Jiarui Lu, Yuyang Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Jiatao Gu, Navdeep Jaitly, Joshua M. Susskind, Miguel \'Angel Bautista
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Beyond Pairwise Attention: Higher-Order Modular Attention for Efficient Sequence Learning

The paper introduces Higher-Order Modular Attention (HOMA), a new attention mechanism that combines standard pairwise self‑attention with an explicit triadic attention pathway. HOMA uses overlapping blocks, local windows, and a low‑rank projection to make triadic interactions tractable. Experiments on controlled PARITY and MATCH3 tasks, as well as TAPE benchmarks, show that HOMA matches or outperforms matched pairwise and purely triadic baselines, especially when dependencies extend beyond triadic order, and it often converges faster and uses parameters more efficiently.

By Shirin Amiraslani, Xin Gao