Breaking Quadratic Barriers: A Non-Attention LLM for Ultra-Long Context Horizons
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Abstract (arXiv)
We present a novel non attention based architecture for large language models (LLMs) that efficiently handles very long context windows, on the order of hundreds of thousands to potentially millions of tokens. Unlike traditional Transformer designs, which suffer from quadratic memory and computation overload due to the nature of the self attention mechanism, our model avoids token to token attention entirely. Instead, it combines the following complementary components: State Space blocks (inspired by S4) that learn continuous time convolution kernels and scale near linearly with sequence length, Multi Resolution Convolution layers that capture local context at different dilation levels, a lightweight Recurrent Supervisor to maintain a global hidden state across sequential chunks, and Retrieval Augmented External Memory that stores and retrieves high-level chunk embeddings without reintroducing quadratic operations.
Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 20 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 May 2025.
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15 of 20 references.
References · 15
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3 more
- 2019Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modellingcited by 726
- 2019Latent Retrieval for Weakly Supervised Open Domain Question Answeringcited by 695
- 2016Neural Machine Translation in Linear Timecited by 66
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 2.
2 papers.
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- 2025Every Token Counts: Generalizing 16M Ultra-Long Context in Large Language Models
- 2026Learning When to Attend: Conditional Memory Access for Long-Context LLMs
- 2024A Little Goes a Long Way: Efficient Long Context Training and Inference with Partial Contexts
- 2025Training-free Context-adaptive Attention for Efficient Long Context Modeling
- 2026Titan-Llama: Retrofitting Pre-trained LLMs with External Neural Memory Modules
- 2025From 128K to 4M: Efficient Training of Ultra-Long Context Large Language Models
- 2024Taipan: Efficient and Expressive State Space Language Models with Selective Attention
- 2024InfLLM: Training-Free Long-Context Extrapolation for LLMs with an Efficient Context Memory