# Synergy: End-to-end Concept Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12769 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12769/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 24 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04768/) (2020)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13626/) (2021)
- [Quest: Query-Aware Sparsity for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10774/) (2024)
- [Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11089/) (2025)
- [MInference 1.0: Accelerating Pre-filling for Long-Context LLMs via Dynamic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02490/) (2024)
- [MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07185/) (2023)
- [Byte Latent Transformer: Patches Scale Better Than Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09871/) (2024)
- [RetrievalAttention: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Vector Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10516/) (2024)
- [Hierarchical Transformers Are More Efficient Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13711/) (2021)
- [Efficient Transformers with Dynamic Token Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09761/) (2022)
- [Block Transformer: Global-to-Local Language Modeling for Fast Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02657/) (2024)
- [MAGNET: Improving the Multilingual Fairness of Language Models with Adaptive Gradient-Based Tokenization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08818/) (2024)
- [MrT5: Dynamic Token Merging for Efficient Byte-level Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20771/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present Synergy, a language model that bridges different levels of abstraction in an end-to-end fashion through a learned routing mechanism. Focusing on low-level linguistic abstraction, we trained our model as a byte-level language model. Our model spontaneously learns to tokenize bytes, producing fewer concept tokens than Byte-level Byte Pair Encoder (BBPE) tokenizers while keeping comparable performance. By comparing with Llama3, we observed an advantage of Synergy under the same model scale and training dataset size. Further studies show that the middle part (the higher abstraction part) of our model performs better when positional encodings are removed, suggesting the emergence of position-independent concepts. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of tokenizer-free architectures, paving the way for more robust and flexible pipelines.