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Oct 6

Scaling Linear Attention with Sparse State Expansion

The Transformer architecture, despite its widespread success, struggles with long-context scenarios due to quadratic computation and linear memory growth. While various linear attention variants mitigate these efficiency constraints by compressing context into fixed-size states, they often degrade performance in tasks such as in-context retrieval and reasoning. To address this limitation and achieve more effective context compression, we propose two key innovations. First, we introduce a row-sparse update formulation for linear attention by conceptualizing state updating as information classification. This enables sparse state updates via softmax-based top-k hard classification, thereby extending receptive fields and reducing inter-class interference. Second, we present Sparse State Expansion (SSE) within the sparse framework, which expands the contextual state into multiple partitions, effectively decoupling parameter size from state capacity while maintaining the sparse classification paradigm. Our design, supported by efficient parallelized implementations, yields effective classification and discriminative state representations. We extensively validate SSE in both pure linear and hybrid (SSE-H) architectures across language modeling, in-context retrieval, and mathematical reasoning benchmarks. SSE demonstrates strong retrieval performance and scales favorably with state size. Moreover, after reinforcement learning (RL) training, our 2B SSE-H model achieves state-of-the-art mathematical reasoning performance among small reasoning models, scoring 64.7 on AIME24 and 51.3 on AIME25, significantly outperforming similarly sized open-source Transformers. These results highlight SSE as a promising and efficient architecture for long-context modeling.

  • 9 authors
·
Jul 22, 2025

MARCH: Scaling Recurrent Memory with Content-Routed State Anchors

Transformers owe much of their strong long-context retrieval capability to a token-level memory that grows with context length. This flexibility, however, incurs a quadratic computation complexity during training and a key--value cache that grows linearly during autoregressive inference. Recurrent alternatives offer efficient decoding by compressing the entire history into a fixed-size state, but often underperform on recall-intensive tasks since earlier associations usually get overwritten by subsequent updates, and only the most recent contextual information is retained. In this paper, we introduce Memory-Anchor Routing across Context History (MARCH), a network architecture that effectively scales state-space models beyond a fixed-size dimension, while maintaining computational efficiency over long-sequences. MARCH periodically caches cumulative recurrent-state checkpoints as state anchors and associates each anchor with a compact, content-conditioned anchor key. This lets MARCH maintain a memory bank, which can grow as context length increases, providing a controllable trade-off between historical resolution and memory cost. At each token, MARCH produces an anchor query to attend all causally available state anchors, and the output is calculated as an attention-style aggregation over all historical anchors along the current state. We show that after standard pretraining, MARCH consistently outperforms multiple linear attention variants across commonsense reasoning, LongBench, and in-context retrieval. These results demonstrate that content-routed state caching substantially strengthens recurrent long-range memory while preserving its native computation path.

  • 9 authors
·
Aug 11 3

DREAMSTATE: Diffusing States and Parameters for Recurrent Large Language Models

Modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), such as RWKV, are distinguished by their powerful short-range modeling capabilities and efficient fixed-size states, which constitute a core advantage over standard Transformers. However, there is a significant lack of research into their internal state as an editable knowledge representation. To fill this gap, we first explore the representational properties of the RWKV state by proposing the DREAMSTATE framework. This framework utilizes a conditional Diffusion Transformer (DiT) to directly model the probability manifold of the state, enabling its generation and editing. The structural nature of this representation is validated through t-SNE visualizations and controlled generation experiments. After successfully uncovering and modeling the state's representational potential, we further propose a novel hybrid architecture that combines the local advantages of RNNs with global context adaptability. This architecture features a parallel DiT that processes a variable-length global context to dynamically generate and adjust the core recurrent module's WKV parameters, transforming the fixed recurrence mechanism into a context-aware dynamic function. Experiments demonstrate that this hybrid model can be trained stably via a multi-objective loss, validating its design feasibility. Our work not only opens a new research direction for RNN state representation but also provides a concrete architectural reference for future model design. The code is publicly available at: https://huggingface.co/2dgx41s/DreamState.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 26

CARVE: Content-Aware Recurrent with Value Efficiency for Chunk-Parallel Linear Attention

Recurrent delta-rule models keep a fixed-size state matrix S (d_v x d_k) that compresses all past context. The state of the art (GDN-2) gates this update with element-wise matrix erase/write masks. This is powerful but has two defects. First, both gates are computed from the incoming token alone, making the model memory-blind: it decides what to erase without seeing what it has stored. Second, value-axis coupling in the erase gate blocks the WY-form triangular chunk solver that drives efficient training -- the intra-chunk system splits into d_v independent solves, collapsing throughput to serial-recurrence cost. We introduce CARVE (Content-Aware Recurrent with Value Efficiency), which fixes both and, via a single-launch "megakernel" scheduling of the same WY-form math, trains faster than the matrix-gated baseline it replaces. The key idea is architectural: restricting all gating to the key axis makes the intra-chunk coupling independent of the value index, restoring one unmodified WY-form solve. Within this constraint, CARVE conditions both gates on a content signal read once per chunk from the chunk-boundary state and folded algebraically into each gate's low-rank projection (by associativity, U(Sq)=(US)q), giving memory-aware gating at negligible extra traffic. At init the content projections are zero, so CARVE is bit-identical to the baseline; we prove the one-chunk staleness perturbs gates by only O(1/sqrt(L)), matching a measured 0.18% deviation flat up to L=128. At 1.3B parameters / 100B FineWeb-Edu tokens on H100 (three seeds), CARVE improves every axis: WikiText perplexity 15.72 vs 15.90 (hybrid 15.41 vs 15.62), +0.63 pp average common-sense accuracy, and state-of-the-art RULER and real-world recall -- while training +1.4% faster at matched depth and +19.3% at iso-quality depth, at +13% peak memory. Backed by six formal guarantees.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 5

Parallel Causal Associative Fields: Gated Sparse Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling

Transformers achieve strong language modeling performance by providing direct token-to-token communication paths, but causal self-attention scales quadratically with context length. Recurrent and state-space models reduce this cost, yet compress history into sequentially updated fixed-size states. This paper studies a third primitive: a parallel content-addressed memory over causal successor records. The proposed Parallel Causal Associative Field (PCAF) writes local records from a context window into hash buckets, retrieves a bounded candidate set for the current query, forms a sparse cache distribution over successor tokens, and mixes that cache with a parametric local language model through a learned gate. The resulting model maintains sparse long-context access while avoiding a single fixed recurrent state bottleneck. We evaluate PCAF under full autoregressive pretraining on WikiText-103 and PG-19 using a distributed Google Cloud TPU v4-32 pod. At 303M parameters and context length T = 2048, PCAF-semantic reaches 36.31 perplexity on WikiText-103 and 52.45 perplexity on PG-19, compared with 47.49 and 53.84 for a matched dense Transformer. PCAF-semantic simultaneously processes 0.61-0.62M tokens/s across the TPU pod, versus 0.43M tokens/s for dense and local attention baselines. Supporting 41M-parameter multi-seed sweeps and single-GPU component ablations show that the associative cache, retrieval capacity, and learned gate materially affect the speed-quality trade-off.

  • 1 authors
·
Jun 8

Kaczmarz Linear Attention

Long-context language modeling remains central to modern sequence modeling, but the quadratic cost of Transformer attention makes scaling computationally prohibitive. Linear recurrent models address this bottleneck by compressing the context into a fixed-size state, making the rule that forgets, writes, and edits information a central design problem. To address state maintenance, Gated DeltaNet (GDN) combines gated state decay with delta-rule residual writes, using a learnable coefficient to balance forgetting and update magnitude. However, this coefficient is learned empirically rather than derived from the underlying objective, which can lead to suboptimal update magnitudes. We revisit the online-regression objective underlying GDN and, inspired by the Kaczmarz projection method, derive the key-norm-normalized dynamic step size β_t = η_t / (|k_t|_2^2 + ε) for residual updates. We propose Kaczmarz Linear Attention (KLA), a one-scalar modification of GDN that preserves the state shape, gates, linear recurrence, and chunkwise parallel algorithm. At the 0.4B scale with a 1B-token budget, KLA achieves the lowest validation perplexity among evaluated linear-time baselines, 8.09 versus 8.50 for GDN, and remains stable up to 65K tokens. On controlled tasks, KLA reaches 100% on single-needle-in-a-haystack retrieval, improves 8x multi-query associative recall by 7.03 points over GDN, and delivers 2.1x higher decode throughput at 32K context. These results suggest that the key-norm-normalized Kaczmarz coefficient is a first-order design axis for delta-rule sequence models: it improves accuracy, extrapolation, and decoding efficiency without changing the recurrent state or hardware kernel.

  • 3 authors
·
May 8

LOCI: Spatial Linear Memory for Streaming World Models

When a camera revisits a previously observed region, a video world model should reproduce what was there before. This requires both remembering past observations and retrieving the right one for the current viewpoint. Key-value caches preserve visual detail but grow with video length; recurrent memory is compact but compresses history into a fixed-size state, so individual past observations are no longer directly accessible. We introduce LOCI, a hybrid spatial-memory architecture that keeps both representations. In half of the transformer blocks, main attention keeps a key-value cache of past observations; in the other half, it is restricted to the current chunk and complemented by a recurrent linear-attention memory whose reads and writes are conditioned on projective camera geometry, so viewpoint enters both memory addressing and stored content. Recurrent readouts flow into subsequent cache-backed blocks and supply their queries with accumulated scene context. On the public MIND memory benchmark and on held-out recorded trajectories, LOCI reproduces revisited content more faithfully than representative world models and a same-recipe full-softmax model; with full history, it lowers peak memory at equal length by about 30% relative to full softmax. With a bounded bank of retained observations, it streams long videos at constant memory and remains more faithful than full softmax under the same budget.

Attend Locally, Remember Linearly: Linear Attention as Cross-Frame Memory for Autoregressive Video Diffusion

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion is a powerful paradigm for streaming and interactive video generation. However, its reliance on softmax self-attention leads to quadratic compute complexity in sequence length and memory usage due to key-value caching, which limits its scalability to long video horizons. Existing remedies (e.g., sparse attention and KV-cache compression) reduce per-step cost but still rely on a linearly growing cache or irreversibly discard past context, and thus fail to address linear memory growth and streaming context management. To address this scalability bottleneck, we propose ARL2 (Attend Locally, Remember Linearly), a hybrid attention module that replaces quadratic cross-frame attention with a fixed-size recurrent state. We decompose self-attention into two branches: an intra-frame softmax branch for spatial detail and local dependencies, and an inter-frame gated recurrent linear branch that maintains a fixed-size state for streaming context. Our key insight is that softmax attention captures fine-grained local interactions, while a recurrent state provides controllable long-range memory. This design achieves linear-time scaling with constant memory while improving temporal consistency over the full-softmax model. To prevent noisy intermediate states from corrupting memory, we update the recurrent state only after the denoised pass. To avoid within-frame information asymmetry, all tokens share the same pre-update state rather than sequential updates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to convert a pretrained AR video diffusion model into a hybrid linear attention architecture, through an efficient two-stage training scheme for AR video. With 75% of layers replaced by hybrid linear attention, the model achieves up to 2.26 wall-clock speedup and 54% memory reduction, while maintaining comparable quality with improving temporal consistency.

  • 3 authors
·
May 19

HLA-WM: Hybrid Linear Attention for Long-Horizon Video World Models

Long-horizon video world models require persistent memory to preserve scene consistency over extended rollouts. Softmax attention retains the full generation history through a growing KV cache, whereas recurrent linear attention compresses history into fixed-size states with substantially lower memory cost. However, we identify severe long-range forgetting in Gated DeltaNet (GDN), where information from distant but relevant scenes is progressively attenuated by subsequent state updates. To address this limitation, we propose HLA-WM, a training-free hybrid linear-attention framework that combines coarse-grained geometry-guided retrieval with fine-grained recurrent linear-state computation. HLA-WM exploits the affine structure of GDN to cache compact chunk-wise transition summaries, retrieve scene-relevant historical chunks using camera geometry, and recompose them into query-specific recurrent states. On the 60-second SANA-WM-Bench, HLA-WM improves all six aggregate revisit-consistency and camera-control metrics of the base autoregressive generator without additional training, including a 0.74 dB PSNR gain and a 28.5% reduction in rotation error. The improvements persist after downstream refinement and generalize to MBench-A, where HLA-WM consistently improves all three revisit-consistency metrics across all four subsets and all evaluated inference modes over 547 samples. At a 60-second context, HLA-WM reduces historical-state memory by 12times relative to full KV caching while incurring at most a 1.6% reduction in inference throughput. These results demonstrate that selectively addressable recurrent memory can improve long-range scene recall while preserving the efficiency advantages of GDN. Project page: https://caesarhhh.github.io/hla-wm/

DAMP: Decay-Aware Mixed-Precision Recurrent-State Quantization

Softmax attention stores key and value vectors for every preceding token, causing inference memory to grow with sequence length. Recent language models incorporating Gated DeltaNet (GDN) or Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) reduce this cost by replacing the KV cache in most layers with fixed-size recurrent states. However, these recurrent states are commonly stored in FP32 and consume substantial GPU memory; their updates are memory-bandwidth bound and contribute significantly to decoding latency. To our knowledge, we are the first to study post-training quantization of recurrent states in GDN and KDA based language models. We find that uniform quantization provides a poor accuracy--storage trade-off: INT8 and FP8 already degrade accuracy on complex reasoning tasks, while INT4 and NVFP4 reduce it to near zero. We further find that most quantization-error energy is concentrated in a small subset of channels and that the relative decay strength of state channels remains stable across prompts and tasks. Motivated by these findings, DAMP uses both quantization-error energy and decay-based persistence to identify high-risk channels during offline calibration. It stores these channels at higher precision and the remainder in INT8. We evaluate DAMP on Qwen3.6-35B and Kimi-Linear-48B across six benchmarks covering mathematical reasoning, general reasoning, and code generation. At 9.9 bits per state value, DAMP maintains average accuracy close to the FP32 baseline. DAMP reduces recurrent-state storage by 69.1%, accelerates the recurrent-state update kernel by up to 2.01x, and lowers full-model TPOT by up to 10.9%.

  • 8 authors
·
Aug 26

Gated DeltaNet-2: Decoupling Erase and Write in Linear Attention

Linear attention replaces the unbounded cache of softmax attention with a fixed-size recurrent state, reducing sequence mixing to linear time and decoding to constant memory. The hard part is not just what to forget, but how to edit this compressed memory without scrambling existing associations. Delta-rule models subtract the current read before writing a new value, and Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) sharpens forgetting with channel-wise decay. But the active edit still uses a single scalar gate to control two different things: how much old content to erase on the key side and how much new content to commit on the value side. We introduce Gated DeltaNet-2, which generalizes both Gated DeltaNet and KDA by inheriting adaptive forgetting and channel-wise decay while addressing their shared limitation, the scalar tie between erasing and writing. Gated Delta Rule-2 separates these roles with a channel-wise erase gate b_t and a channel-wise write gate w_t, reducing to KDA when both gates collapse to the same scalar and to Gated DeltaNet when the decay also collapses. We derive a fast-weight update view, a chunkwise WY algorithm with channel-wise decay absorbed into asymmetric erase factors, and a gate-aware backward pass that preserves efficient parallel training. At 1.3B parameters trained on 100B FineWeb-Edu tokens, Gated DeltaNet-2 achieves the strongest overall results among Mamba-2, Gated DeltaNet, KDA, and Mamba-3 variants across language modeling, commonsense reasoning, and retrieval. Its advantage is most pronounced on long-context RULER needle-in-a-haystack benchmarks, where it improves the evaluated multi-key retrieval setting and remains strong in both recurrent and hybrid settings. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/GatedDeltaNet-2.

nvidia NVIDIA
·
May 20 1

Apriel-H1: Towards Efficient Enterprise Reasoning Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable reasoning capabilities through transformer architectures with attention mechanisms. However, transformers suffer from quadratic time and memory complexity in the attention module (MHA) and require caching key-value states during inference, which severely limits throughput and scalability. High inference throughput is critical for agentic tasks, long-context reasoning, efficient deployment under high request loads, and more efficient test-time compute scaling. State Space Models (SSMs) such as Mamba offer a promising alternative with linear inference complexity and a constant memory footprint via recurrent computation with fixed-size hidden states. In this technical report we introduce the Apriel-H1 family of hybrid LLMs that combine transformer attention and SSM sequence mixers for efficient reasoning at 15B model size. These models are obtained through incremental distillation from a pretrained reasoning transformer, Apriel-Nemotron-15B-Thinker, progressively replacing less critical attention layers with linear Mamba blocks. We release multiple post-distillation variants of Apriel-H1-15B-Thinker with different SSM-to-MHA ratios and analyse how reasoning performance degrades as more Mamba layers replace MHA. Additionally, we release a 30/50 hybrid variant of Apriel-H1, further fine-tuned on a supervised dataset of reasoning traces, achieving over 2x higher inference throughput when deployed in the production-ready vLLM environment, with minimal degradation in reasoning performance. This shows that distilled hybrid SSM-Transformer architectures can deliver substantial efficiency gains over the pretrained transformer equivalent without substantially compromising the reasoning quality.

  • 13 authors
·
Nov 4, 2025

Simple linear attention language models balance the recall-throughput tradeoff

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the KV-cache's aggressive memory consumption. In this work, we explore whether we can improve language model efficiency (e.g. by reducing memory consumption) without compromising on recall. By applying experiments and theory to a broad set of architectures, we identify a key tradeoff between a model's state size and recall ability. We show that efficient alternatives to attention (e.g. H3, Mamba, RWKV) maintain a fixed-size recurrent state, but struggle at recall. We propose BASED a simple architecture combining linear and sliding window attention. By varying BASED window size and linear attention feature dimension, we can dial the state size and traverse the pareto frontier of the recall-memory tradeoff curve, recovering the full quality of attention on one end and the small state size of attention-alternatives on the other. We train language models up to 1.3b parameters and show that BASED matches the strongest sub-quadratic models (e.g. Mamba) in perplexity and outperforms them on real-world recall-intensive tasks by 6.22 accuracy points. Implementations of linear attention are often less efficient than optimized standard attention implementations. To make BASED competitive, we develop IO-aware algorithms that enable 24x higher throughput on language generation than FlashAttention-2, when generating 1024 tokens using 1.3b parameter models. Code for this work is provided at: https://github.com/HazyResearch/based.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28, 2024 12

MoM: Linear Sequence Modeling with Mixture-of-Memories

Linear sequence modeling methods, such as linear attention, state space modeling, and linear RNNs, offer significant efficiency improvements by reducing the complexity of training and inference. However, these methods typically compress the entire input sequence into a single fixed-size memory state, which leads to suboptimal performance on recall-intensive downstream tasks. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, particularly the brain's ability to maintain robust long-term memory while mitigating "memory interference", we introduce a novel architecture called Mixture-of-Memories (MoM). MoM utilizes multiple independent memory states, with a router network directing input tokens to specific memory states. This approach greatly enhances the overall memory capacity while minimizing memory interference. As a result, MoM performs exceptionally well on recall-intensive tasks, surpassing existing linear sequence modeling techniques. Despite incorporating multiple memory states, the computation of each memory state remains linear in complexity, allowing MoM to retain the linear-complexity advantage during training, while constant-complexity during inference. Our experimental results show that MoM significantly outperforms current linear sequence models on downstream language tasks, particularly recall-intensive tasks, and even achieves performance comparable to Transformer models. The code is released at https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/MoM and is also released as a part of https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linear-MoE.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 19, 2025 2

A Systematic Analysis of Hybrid Linear Attention

Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading to hybrid architectures that combine linear and full attention layers. Despite extensive hybrid architecture research, the choice of linear attention component has not been deeply explored. We systematically evaluate various linear attention models across generations - vector recurrences to advanced gating mechanisms - both standalone and hybridized. To enable this comprehensive analysis, we trained and open-sourced 72 models: 36 at 340M parameters (20B tokens) and 36 at 1.3B parameters (100B tokens), covering six linear attention variants across five hybridization ratios. Benchmarking on standard language modeling and recall tasks reveals that superior standalone linear models do not necessarily excel in hybrids. While language modeling remains stable across linear-to-full attention ratios, recall significantly improves with increased full attention layers, particularly below a 3:1 ratio. Our study highlights selective gating, hierarchical recurrence, and controlled forgetting as critical for effective hybrid models. We recommend architectures such as HGRN-2 or GatedDeltaNet with a linear-to-full ratio between 3:1 and 6:1 to achieve Transformer-level recall efficiently. Our models are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/collections/m-a-p/hybrid-linear-attention-research-686c488a63d609d2f20e2b1e.

  • 11 authors
·
Jul 8, 2025 1

MSA: Memory Sparse Attention for Efficient End-to-End Memory Model Scaling to 100M Tokens

Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) is typically limited to 1M tokens. Existing approaches, such as hybrid linear attention, fixed-size memory states (e.g., RNNs), and external storage methods like RAG or agent systems, attempt to extend this limit. However, they often suffer from severe precision degradation and rapidly increasing latency as context length grows, an inability to dynamically modify memory content, or a lack of end-to-end optimization. These bottlenecks impede complex scenarios like large-corpus summarization, Digital Twins, and long-history agent reasoning, while limiting memory capacity and slowing inference. We present Memory Sparse Attention (MSA), an end-to-end trainable, efficient, and massively scalable memory model framework. Through core innovations including scalable sparse attention and document-wise RoPE, MSA achieves linear complexity in both training and inference while maintaining exceptional stability, exhibiting less than 9% degradation when scaling from 16K to 100M tokens. Furthermore, KV cache compression, combined with Memory Parallel, enables 100M-token inference on 2xA800 GPUs. We also propose Memory Interleaving to facilitate complex multi-hop reasoning across scattered memory segments. MSA significantly surpasses frontier LLMs, state-of-the-art RAG systems, and leading memory agents in long-context benchmarks. These results demonstrate that by decoupling memory capacity from reasoning, MSA provides a scalable foundation to endow general-purpose models with intrinsic, lifetime-scale memory.

EverMindAI EverMind
·
Mar 5 2

Neural Attention Search Linear: Towards Adaptive Token-Level Hybrid Attention Models

The quadratic computational complexity of softmax transformers has become a bottleneck in long-context scenarios. In contrast, linear attention model families provide a promising direction towards a more efficient sequential model. These linear attention models compress past KV values into a single hidden state, thereby efficiently reducing complexity during both training and inference. However, their expressivity remains limited by the size of their hidden state. Previous work proposed interleaving softmax and linear attention layers to reduce computational complexity while preserving expressivity. Nevertheless, the efficiency of these models remains bottlenecked by their softmax attention layers. In this paper, we propose Neural Attention Search Linear (NAtS-L), a framework that applies both linear attention and softmax attention operations within the same layer on different tokens. NAtS-L automatically determines whether a token can be handled by a linear attention model, i.e., tokens that have only short-term impact and can be encoded into fixed-size hidden states, or require softmax attention, i.e., tokens that contain information related to long-term retrieval and need to be preserved for future queries. By searching for optimal Gated DeltaNet and softmax attention combinations across tokens, we show that NAtS-L provides a strong yet efficient token-level hybrid architecture.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 3

Reactive Transformer (RxT) -- Stateful Real-Time Processing for Event-Driven Reactive Language Models

The Transformer architecture has become the de facto standard for Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating remarkable capabilities in language understanding and generation. However, its application in conversational AI is fundamentally constrained by its stateless nature and the quadratic computational complexity (O(L^2)) with respect to sequence length L. Current models emulate memory by reprocessing an ever-expanding conversation history with each turn, leading to prohibitive costs and latency in long dialogues. This paper introduces the Reactive Transformer (RxT), a novel architecture designed to overcome these limitations by shifting from a data-driven to an event-driven paradigm. RxT processes each conversational turn as a discrete event in real-time, maintaining context in an integrated, fixed-size Short-Term Memory (STM) system. The architecture features a distinct operational cycle where a generator-decoder produces a response based on the current query and the previous memory state, after which a memory-encoder and a dedicated Memory Attention network asynchronously update the STM with a representation of the complete interaction. This design fundamentally alters the scaling dynamics, reducing the total user-facing cost of a conversation from quadratic (O(N^2 cdot T)) to linear (O(N cdot T)) with respect to the number of interactions N. By decoupling response generation from memory updates, RxT achieves low latency, enabling truly real-time, stateful, and economically viable long-form conversations. We validated our architecture with a series of proof-of-concept experiments on synthetic data, demonstrating superior performance and constant-time inference latency compared to a baseline stateless model of comparable size.

ReactiveAI Reactive AI
·
Oct 3, 2025 2

Self-Attention And Beyond the Infinite: Towards Linear Transformers with Infinite Self-Attention

The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a content-adaptive token graph, accumulating multi-hop interactions through a discounted Neumann series over attention matrices. This links self-attention to classical graph centrality (Katz, PageRank, eigenvector centrality) for interpretable token weighting. We also show the Neumann kernel equals the fundamental matrix of an absorbing Markov chain, so a token's centrality is its expected number of random-walk visits before absorption. We then propose Linear-InfSA, a linear-time variant that approximates the principal eigenvector of the implicit attention operator without forming the full attention matrix. It keeps an auxiliary state of fixed size proportional to per-head dimension dh (independent of sequence length N), is drop-in compatible with Vision Transformers, and supports stable training at 4096 by 4096 and inference at 9216 by 9216 (about 332k tokens). In a 4-layer ViT (53.5M parameters, 59 GFLOPs at 224 by 224), Linear-InfSA reaches 84.7% top-1 on ImageNet-1K, a +3.2 point architectural gain over an equal-depth softmax ViT trained with the same recipe. On ImageNet-V2, InfViT variants outperform all compared baselines (up to 79.8% vs 76.8%), indicating robustness under distribution shift. On an A100 40GB GPU, Linear-InfViT runs at 231 images/s and 0.87 J/image (13x better throughput and energy than equal-depth ViT) and is the only tested model to complete 9216 by 9216 inference without out-of-memory. The linear approximation closely matches the dominant eigenvector of the quadratic operator (cosine 0.985).

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 26

Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time

Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memory (called hidden state), attention allows attending to the entire context window, capturing the direct dependencies of all tokens. This more accurate modeling of dependencies, however, comes with a quadratic cost, limiting the model to a fixed-length context. We present a new neural long-term memory module that learns to memorize historical context and helps attention to attend to the current context while utilizing long past information. We show that this neural memory has the advantage of fast parallelizable training while maintaining a fast inference. From a memory perspective, we argue that attention due to its limited context but accurate dependency modeling performs as a short-term memory, while neural memory due to its ability to memorize the data, acts as a long-term, more persistent, memory. Based on these two modules, we introduce a new family of architectures, called Titans, and present three variants to address how one can effectively incorporate memory into this architecture. Our experimental results on language modeling, common-sense reasoning, genomics, and time series tasks show that Titans are more effective than Transformers and recent modern linear recurrent models. They further can effectively scale to larger than 2M context window size with higher accuracy in needle-in-haystack tasks compared to baselines.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 31, 2024 3

Enabling Multi-Agent Transfer Reinforcement Learning via Scenario Independent Representation

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms are widely adopted in tackling complex tasks that require collaboration and competition among agents in dynamic Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). However, learning such tasks from scratch is arduous and may not always be feasible, particularly for MASs with a large number of interactive agents due to the extensive sample complexity. Therefore, reusing knowledge gained from past experiences or other agents could efficiently accelerate the learning process and upscale MARL algorithms. In this study, we introduce a novel framework that enables transfer learning for MARL through unifying various state spaces into fixed-size inputs that allow one unified deep-learning policy viable in different scenarios within a MAS. We evaluated our approach in a range of scenarios within the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC) environment, and the findings show significant enhancements in multi-agent learning performance using maneuvering skills learned from other scenarios compared to agents learning from scratch. Furthermore, we adopted Curriculum Transfer Learning (CTL), enabling our deep learning policy to progressively acquire knowledge and skills across pre-designed homogeneous learning scenarios organized by difficulty levels. This process promotes inter- and intra-agent knowledge transfer, leading to high multi-agent learning performance in more complicated heterogeneous scenarios.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 12, 2024

MemBodied: Recurrent Associative Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-Language-Action models provide a strong foundation for general-purpose robot control, yet a vast majority of policies do not preserve and leverage episode-level information beyond the current observation. This limitation is consequential in history-dependent manipulation tasks that depend on information available only in past observations. Retaining past observations in context can aid in recovering this information, but at the significant cost of ever-growing, bloated context and inference latency. We thus introduce MemBodied, a fixed-size episodic memory with two complementary components: an associative state that records interactions across policy calls and an episode anchor that preserves a compact representation of the initial scene as a reference. At each policy call, the model conditions action generation on the current input and the memory components, rather than directly using past observations. Across five evaluated RMBench tasks requiring memory, MemBodied achieves 7.81times the mean success rate of a stateless policy and 2.98times of vanilla recurrent memory, while outperforming the strongest memory-augmented baseline by 1.3times with 10times fewer added parameters. On the fully observable LIBERO-Long suite, it reached 90.6%, a 5.4% improvement over the stateless π_0 policy. These findings support MemBodied as a practical alternative to expanding the policy context for history-dependent manipulation.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 22 2

SeedPolicy: Horizon Scaling via Self-Evolving Diffusion Policy for Robot Manipulation

Imitation Learning (IL) enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from expert demonstrations. Diffusion Policy (DP) models multi-modal expert behaviors but suffers performance degradation as observation horizons increase, limiting long-horizon manipulation. We propose Self-Evolving Gated Attention (SEGA), a temporal module that maintains a time-evolving latent state via gated attention, enabling efficient recurrent updates that compress long-horizon observations into a fixed-size representation while filtering irrelevant temporal information. Integrating SEGA into DP yields Self-Evolving Diffusion Policy (SeedPolicy), which resolves the temporal modeling bottleneck and enables scalable horizon extension with moderate overhead. On the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark with 50 manipulation tasks, SeedPolicy outperforms DP and other IL baselines. Averaged across both CNN and Transformer backbones, SeedPolicy achieves 36.8% relative improvement in clean settings and 169% relative improvement in randomized challenging settings over the DP. Compared to vision-language-action models such as RDT with 1.2B parameters, SeedPolicy achieves competitive performance with one to two orders of magnitude fewer parameters, demonstrating strong efficiency and scalability. These results establish SeedPolicy as a state-of-the-art imitation learning method for long-horizon robotic manipulation. Code is available at: https://github.com/Youqiang-Gui/SeedPolicy.

  • 7 authors
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Mar 5 2

Why Gated DeltaNet Survives 4-Bit Quantization: NVFP4 W4A4 for the Recurrent Half of a Hybrid 27B LLM

Hybrid LLMs pair softmax attention with linear-attention layers such as Gated DeltaNet (GDN), whose recurrent state summarizes the context in fixed size. Early community 4-bit quantizations of Qwen3.8-27B (48 GDN layers, 16 attention layers) left the GDN block in 8- or 16-bit precision -- especially its decay and write-strength gates -- on the intuition that errors in a recurrence accumulate over long contexts. We test that intuition by building Minima: NVFP4 W4A4 on all 496 linear layers, GDN included. Across perplexity at 4K/32K, MMLU-Pro, GSM8K, AIME'25, GPQA-Diamond, LiveCodeBench, and RULER retrieval to 64K, Minima matches BF16 within seed noise (5-task average -0.52) while being the smallest (17.5 GiB) and fastest-prefill (+14-19%) recipe we compare, and its 32K perplexity gap shrinks with position. A four-part mechanism study explains why: (i) NVFP4's 16-element block scaling localizes the residual stream's extreme outliers, equalizing activation error across layer roles; (ii) the supposedly fragile gate projections are the least sensitive -- softplus/exponential and sigmoid parameterizations compress ~11% GEMM error to ~2% output error; (iii) the delta-rule recurrence holds injected noise at a flat plateau over 32K tokens and forgets a state impulse within hundreds of steps, because each write overwrites the state along the current key direction; (iv) the per-token quantization cost washes out with context instead of compounding. We also repair a global-scale mismatch that arises when per-module-calibrated NVFP4 checkpoints are served by kernels that fuse those modules into one GEMM, and show calibrated FP8 KV-cache scales are performance-free. The result: a practical recipe -- quantize everything, ship KV scales -- and a mechanistic account of why the recurrent half of a hybrid LLM is the easy half to quantize. Checkpoint: https://huggingface.co/minima-ai/mnma_qwen3.8_27b_nvfp4

minima-ai Minima AI
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Sep 2 2

Continual Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Hypernetworks

Effective planning in model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) and model-predictive control (MPC) relies on the accuracy of the learned dynamics model. In many instances of MBRL and MPC, this model is assumed to be stationary and is periodically re-trained from scratch on state transition experience collected from the beginning of environment interactions. This implies that the time required to train the dynamics model - and the pause required between plan executions - grows linearly with the size of the collected experience. We argue that this is too slow for lifelong robot learning and propose HyperCRL, a method that continually learns the encountered dynamics in a sequence of tasks using task-conditional hypernetworks. Our method has three main attributes: first, it includes dynamics learning sessions that do not revisit training data from previous tasks, so it only needs to store the most recent fixed-size portion of the state transition experience; second, it uses fixed-capacity hypernetworks to represent non-stationary and task-aware dynamics; third, it outperforms existing continual learning alternatives that rely on fixed-capacity networks, and does competitively with baselines that remember an ever increasing coreset of past experience. We show that HyperCRL is effective in continual model-based reinforcement learning in robot locomotion and manipulation scenarios, such as tasks involving pushing and door opening. Our project website with videos is at this link https://rvl.cs.toronto.edu/blog/2020/hypercrl

  • 4 authors
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Sep 24, 2020

Layer-aware TDNN: Speaker Recognition Using Multi-Layer Features from Pre-Trained Models

Recent advances in self-supervised learning (SSL) on Transformers have significantly improved speaker verification (SV) by providing domain-general speech representations. However, existing approaches have underutilized the multi-layered nature of SSL encoders. To address this limitation, we propose the layer-aware time-delay neural network (L-TDNN), which directly performs layer/frame-wise processing on the layer-wise hidden state outputs from pre-trained models, extracting fixed-size speaker vectors. L-TDNN comprises a layer-aware convolutional network, a frame-adaptive layer aggregation, and attentive statistic pooling, explicitly modeling of the recognition and processing of previously overlooked layer dimension. We evaluated L-TDNN across multiple speech SSL Transformers and diverse speech-speaker corpora against other approaches for leveraging pre-trained encoders. L-TDNN consistently demonstrated robust verification performance, achieving the lowest error rates throughout the experiments. Concurrently, it stood out in terms of model compactness and exhibited inference efficiency comparable to the existing systems. These results highlight the advantages derived from the proposed layer-aware processing approach. Future work includes exploring joint training with SSL frontends and the incorporation of score calibration to further enhance state-of-the-art verification performance.

  • 5 authors
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Sep 12, 2024

Understanding and Improving Length Generalization in Hierarchical Sparse Attention Models

Effectively processing long contexts is a critical challenge for language models. While standard Transformers are limited by quadratic complexity and poor length extrapolation, alternative architectures like sliding window attention and state space models sacrifice the ability to effectively utilize the full context due to their fixed-size memory. Chunk-based sparse attention has emerged as a promising paradigm for extreme length generalization, yet the key architectural principles underpinning its success are not yet fully understood. In this work, we present a systematic dissection of these models to identify the core components driving their performance. Through a unified framework and comprehensive ablation studies, we demonstrate that a combination of three design principles is critical: (1) an expressive, non-linear Chunk Encoder with a dedicated CLS token to produce representations for retrieval; (2) a Bypassing Residual Path to stably integrate retrieved global information without it being overridden by the local residual stream; and (3) enforced selection sparsity during pre-training to bridge the train-test distribution gap. We provide a theoretical motivation for intra-chunk information processing and landmark generation. By combining these principles, we establish a new state-of-the-art for training-free length extrapolation, successfully generalizing models trained on a 4K context to 32 million tokens on RULER and BABILong. Our findings provide a clear and empirically-grounded set of design principles for developing future, highly-capable long-context language models.

  • 6 authors
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Apr 29

ClothTransformer: Unified Latent-Space Transformers for Scalable Cloth Simulation

Unified and scalable Transformers have recently achieved remarkable success in modeling diverse phenomena traditionally associated with computer graphics, such as 3D visual effects, rendering processes, and motion in videos. In this work, we take a step further by investigating whether modern Transformer techniques can tackle the challenging task of cloth simulation. To this end, we present ClothTransformer, a framework that reformulates cloth simulation as autoregressive sequence modeling in a learned latent space. Existing neural cloth simulators are largely specialized to single scenarios, intrinsically coupled to the mesh discretization, and lack robust collision handling. Our approach addresses these limitations through three contributions: (1) a unified Transformer architecture that handles diverse scenarios -- body-driven garments, robotic manipulation, and free-fall collisions -- under a single model and achieves approximately 4--9{times} lower error than prior state-of-the-art methods across all scenarios; (2) a scalable latent-space formulation that compresses arbitrary-resolution meshes into a fixed-size set of latent tokens, making temporal dynamics computation independent of mesh resolution; and (3) a diverse-scenario high-fidelity penetration-free dataset of {sim}493.4k frames spanning all three settings, which enables a differentiable Continuous Collision Detection (CCD) module to suppress penetration artifacts. Project Page: https://yucrazing.github.io/clothtransformer/

  • 8 authors
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Jun 6

Self-Revising Discovery Systems for Science: A Categorical Framework for Agentic Artificial Intelligence

Scientific discovery is not only answer generation but revision of the representational regime in which evidence, artifacts, operations, and verifiers are typed. We develop a category-theoretic account of agentic discovery for materials science. In a fixed regime b with schema category S_b, the system state is a copresheaf I_t: S_b -> Set, and provenance is the category of elements \int_{S_b} I_t. Fixed-regime operation is an update on such states, endofunctorial only when provenance-preserving refinements are specified and preserved. Discovery is instead a verified regime transition u: S_b -> S_b': old artifacts are preserved, transported by the left Kan extension Lan_u I_t, and compared with the post-transition state to identify residual content beyond functorial transport. This separates retrieval, search, and discovery without subjective novelty. We instantiate the framework in two systems. In Builder/Breaker, a protein-mechanics world model is revised under a Minimum Description Length gate; the accepted law expresses within-chain flexibility as all-mode elastic compliance conditioned by slow collective-mode participation, or mode-conditioned compliance. In CategoryScienceClaw, typed skills, artifacts, open needs, workflow mutation, gates, stress tests, and public discourse become a proof-carrying knowledge-computation graph. A fiber-network example records candidate models, rejected alternatives, an AIC gate, perturbation tests, and an accepted orientation-tensor anisotropic stiffness surrogate over an isotropic fiber-count descriptor. Together, the cases show how category theory can be both a mathematical language for discovery and an engineering specification for self-revising AI discovery systems.

  • 2 authors
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May 30

Hopfield Networks is All You Need

We introduce a modern Hopfield network with continuous states and a corresponding update rule. The new Hopfield network can store exponentially (with the dimension of the associative space) many patterns, retrieves the pattern with one update, and has exponentially small retrieval errors. It has three types of energy minima (fixed points of the update): (1) global fixed point averaging over all patterns, (2) metastable states averaging over a subset of patterns, and (3) fixed points which store a single pattern. The new update rule is equivalent to the attention mechanism used in transformers. This equivalence enables a characterization of the heads of transformer models. These heads perform in the first layers preferably global averaging and in higher layers partial averaging via metastable states. The new modern Hopfield network can be integrated into deep learning architectures as layers to allow the storage of and access to raw input data, intermediate results, or learned prototypes. These Hopfield layers enable new ways of deep learning, beyond fully-connected, convolutional, or recurrent networks, and provide pooling, memory, association, and attention mechanisms. We demonstrate the broad applicability of the Hopfield layers across various domains. Hopfield layers improved state-of-the-art on three out of four considered multiple instance learning problems as well as on immune repertoire classification with several hundreds of thousands of instances. On the UCI benchmark collections of small classification tasks, where deep learning methods typically struggle, Hopfield layers yielded a new state-of-the-art when compared to different machine learning methods. Finally, Hopfield layers achieved state-of-the-art on two drug design datasets. The implementation is available at: https://github.com/ml-jku/hopfield-layers

  • 16 authors
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Jul 16, 2020

Requential Coding: Pushing the Limits of Model Compression with Self-Generated Training Data

Compression is fundamental to intelligence. A model that can represent its training data as a short code has discovered regularities that enable generalization. Large neural networks may learn functions far simpler than their parameter counts suggest, but it is challenging to construct codes that realize this simplicity. Parameter-based methods such as quantization produce code lengths that scale with model size, insensitive to how much information the parameters store. Prequential coding bypasses this issue by compressing the training trajectory, but codes the exact data sequence regardless of how much the model learns, yielding large codes when the data has high entropy. We introduce requential coding, where a teacher model selects training samples drawn from the student's own distribution. The student's code records only these selections, which cost bits only where teacher and student disagree. The resulting code length is independent of parameter count and data entropy, and often orders of magnitude shorter than the prequential counterpart, with an advantage that grows with scale. This compression sheds light on phenomena inaccessible to prior compressors. Holding loss fixed, larger models and ensembles compress to much smaller sizes despite more parameters. Plugged into a PAC-Bayes bound, the requential code yields state-of-the-art generalization guarantees for billion-parameter LLMs, outperforming bounds built on aggressive post-training quantization even granted zero error. The bound tightens with scale in the compute-optimal regime, as models become increasingly compressible relative to dataset size. The same code predicts that models gradually overfit when trained for multiple epochs. It also isolates the learnable information in a dataset from its unpredictable, random content, revealing that lower-entropy text holds far more learnable structure than higher-entropy image data.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 12

Large Landscape of 4d Superconformal Field Theories from Small Gauge Theories

We systematically explore the space of renormalization group flows of four-dimensional N=1 superconformal field theories (SCFTs) triggered by relevant deformations, as well as by coupling to free chiral multiplets with relevant operators. In this way, we classify all possible fixed point SCFTs that can be obtained from certain rank 1 and 2 supersymmetric gauge theories with small amount of matter multiplets, identifying 7,346 inequivalent fixed points which pass a series of non-trivial consistency checks. This set of fixed points exhibits interesting statistical behaviors, including a narrow distribution of central charges (a, c), a correlation between the number of relevant operators and the ratio a/c, and trends in the lightest operator dimension versus a/c. The ratio a/c of this set is distributed between 0.7228 and 1.2100, where the upper bound is larger than that of previously known interacting SCFTs. Moreover, we find a plethora of highly non-perturbative phenomena, such as (super)symmetry enhancements, operator decoupling, non-commuting renormalization group flows, and dualities. We especially identify amongst these fixed points a new SCFT that has smaller central charges (a, c) = (633{2000},683{2000}) than that of the deformed minimal Argyres-Douglas theory, as well as novel Lagrangian duals for certain N=1 deformed Argyres-Douglas theories. We provide a website https://qft.kaist.ac.kr/landscape to navigate through our set of fixed points.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 21, 2024

Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One

A language model's memory can be worse than no memory at all when the model or its interface is disposed to act on it: a memory that keeps a wrong conclusion but drops the work behind it leads a model to re-emit the stale value as a confident answer, where an empty memory leads it to abstain. We call this brittle memory. The information loss is definitional; the finding is behavioral, and it turns on one thing, whether the memory kept a re-derivation basis (the source) rather than the answer. We measure it with reclaim evaluation: induce a known drift, compress at a fixed budget, deliver a correction that names the error, and score exact recovery, judge-free. Holding the budget fixed and varying only what the compression keeps isolates correctability from capability and from size; an 8B model and a frontier one wall in the same place. A one-line source-first policy, keep the recomputable source, drop the re-derivable conclusion, restores correctability at equal budget where the source is compact and identifiable, with a length-matched control ruling out "more text." We map where the fix fails, show the failure compounds through memory loops, and replicate across three deployed memory systems, real dialogue (MultiWOZ), and tau-bench, a deployed-agent benchmark where whether a lossy memory becomes a harmful action is a joint model-and-interface property. We release the harness, the paired memory conditions, and validators built to come out false.

  • 1 authors
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Jul 20