Gated Slot Attention for Efficient Linear-Time Sequence Modeling
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Abstract (arXiv)
Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant resources for training from scratch. This paper introduces Gated Slot Attention (GSA), which enhances Attention with Bounded-memory-Control (ABC) by incorporating a gating mechanism inspired by Gated Linear Attention (GLA). Essentially, GSA comprises a two-layer GLA linked via operatornamesoftmax, utilizing context-aware memory reading and adaptive forgetting to improve memory capacity while maintaining compact recurrent state size. This design greatly enhances both training and inference efficiency through GLA's hardware-efficient training algorithm and reduced state size. Additionally, retaining the operatornamesoftmax operation is particularly beneficial in "finetuning pretrained Transformers to RNNs" (T2R) settings, reducing the need for extensive training from scratch. Extensive experiments confirm GSA's superior performance in scenarios requiring in-context recall and in T2R settings.
Key facts. Cited by 73 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 69 of its 92 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2024.
Builds on
69 of 92 references.
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