mlsanityData to 13 Oct 2026

Reservoir Transformers

arXiv 2012.15045 ↗First posted 30 Dec 2020cs.CLcited by 18

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Abstract (arXiv)

We demonstrate that transformers obtain impressive performance even when some of the layers are randomly initialized and never updated. Inspired by old and well-established ideas in machine learning, we explore a variety of non-linear "reservoir" layers interspersed with regular transformer layers, and show improvements in wall-clock compute time until convergence, as well as overall performance, on various machine translation and (masked) language modelling tasks.

Key facts. Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 13 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 30 Dec 2020.

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Cited by year (2026 to 13 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 3; 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 7; 2026: 2.

18 papers.

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  1. 2021Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Littlecited by 176
  2. 2023Unleashing the Power of Pre-trained Language Models for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 24
  3. 2022How does the pre-training objective affect what large language models learn about linguistic properties?cited by 16
  4. 2021Efficient and Private Federated Learning with Partially Trainable Networkscited by 13
  5. 2022Layer Freezing & Data Sieving: Missing Pieces of a Generic Framework for Sparse Trainingcited by 11
  6. 2021What's Hidden in a One-layer Randomly Weighted Transformer?cited by 3
  7. 2023Partially Randomizing Transformer Weights for Dialogue Response Diversitycited by 1
  8. 2025Perturbative Gradient Training: A novel training paradigm for bridging the gap between deep neural networks and physical reservoir computingcited by 1
  9. 2025Frozen in Time: Parameter-Efficient Time Series Transformers via Reservoir-Induced Feature Expansion and Fixed Random Dynamicscited by 1
  10. 2026Training-Free Universal Approximation by Prompting Random Transformerscited by 1
  11. 2022Physical Deep Learning with Biologically Plausible Training Methodcited by 0
  12. 2024Changes by Butterflies: Farsighted Forecasting with Group Reservoir Transformercited by 0
6 more
  1. 2025Federated Koopman-Reservoir Learning for Large-Scale Multivariate Time-Series Anomaly Detectioncited by 0
  2. 2025Learning Music Audio Representations With Limited Datacited by 0
  3. 2025ResFormer: All-Time Reservoir Memory for Long Sequence Classificationcited by 0
  4. 2025Echo Flow Networkscited by 0
  5. 2025Reservoir Computing inspired Matrix Multiplication-free Language Modelcited by 0
  6. 2026Quantum Reservoir Computing: Recent Advances and Future Directionscited by 0