# Transformer Reconstructed with Dynamic Value Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.22212 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22212/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [Efficient Estimation of Word Representations in Vector Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1301.3781/) (2013)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [Resurrecting Recurrent Neural Networks for Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06349/) (2023)
- [Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06708/) (2025)
- [Parallelizing Linear Recurrent Neural Nets Over Sequence Length](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04057/) (2017)
- [Transformer Acceleration with Dynamic Sparse Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11299/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Since transformer was firstly published in 2017, several works have been proposed to optimize it. However, the major structure of transformer remains unchanged, ignoring one of its main intrinsic limitations, which is the same static value is used for every query in a head. Transformer itself tries to solve this problem by implementing multi-head attentions, yet the number of heads is limited by complexity. I propose a method to decide a value for each query dynamically, which could cut down all the redundant heads, keeping only one. Consequently, the following feed forward network could be cut down entirely, as each revised embedding has already fetched enough useful values far beyond the context. As a result, a single-head Dynamic Value Attention (DVA) is all you need in a transformer. According to the experiment, DVA may save 37.6% training time than the original transformer meanwhile increasing the learning capability.