# Dual Attention Residuals

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18730 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18730/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.06538/) (2017)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Similarity of Neural Network Representations Revisited](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.00414/) (2019)
- [Root Mean Square Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07467/) (2019)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [Crowdsourcing Multiple Choice Science Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06209/) (2017)
- [DenseFormer: Enhancing Information Flow in Transformers via Depth Weighted Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02622/) (2024)
- [Training Deeper Neural Machine Translation Models with Transparent Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07561/) (2018)
- [MUDDFormer: Breaking Residual Bottlenecks in Transformers via Multiway Dynamic Dense Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12170/) (2025)
- [Frac-Connections: Fractional Extension of Hyper-Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14125/) (2025)
- [Ablate and Rescue: A Causal Analysis of Residual Stream Hyper-Connections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14833/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Multi-Stream Attention Residuals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13630/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent work extends Transformer residual pathways along two complementary axes: historical retrieval selects information from earlier depths, whereas multi-stream methods maintain multiple residual trajectories. These capabilities have largely been studied in isolation, and assigning an independent retriever to each stream still prevents one trajectory from influencing depth selection in another. We propose Dual Attention Residuals (DAR), which brings multi-stream interaction into historical retrieval through reciprocal cross-stream addressing. For each target stream, DAR computes depth weights from normalized states in the opposite stream and applies them to values from the target stream's own history. The retrieved states are combined for an unchanged Transformer branch and updated through constrained gated writes; a block-form variant operates on block-level histories to control overhead. Across dense models from 0.1B to 1B parameters and a 7B sparse-MoE model, DAR consistently improves validation loss over standard residual Transformers and Attention Residuals. Routing ablations show that the gain cannot be explained by an additional stream or value projection alone. Representation and intervention analyses further show that reciprocal cross-stream selection preserves depth-wise diversity and avoids the redundancy or functional imbalance observed in alternative two-stream designs.