# Gated Slot Attention-2: Two-Sided Associative Memory Correction in Linear Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02816 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02816/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [Mamba: Linear-Time Sequence Modeling with Selective State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00752/) (2023)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Can a Suit of Armor Conduct Electricity? A New Dataset for Open Book Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02789/) (2018)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06654/) (2024)
- [Transformers are SSMs: Generalized Models and Efficient Algorithms Through Structured State Space Duality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.21060/) (2024)
- [The FineWeb Datasets: Decanting the Web for the Finest Text Data at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17557/) (2024)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [Simplified State Space Layers for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04933/) (2022)
- [Retentive Network: A Successor to Transformer for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08621/) (2023)
- [Gated Delta Networks: Improving Mamba2 with Delta Rule](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06464/) (2024)
- [Gated Linear Attention Transformers with Hardware-Efficient Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06635/) (2023)
- [Linear Transformers Are Secretly Fast Weight Programmers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11174/) (2021)
- [Resurrecting Recurrent Neural Networks for Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06349/) (2023)
- [Parallelizing Linear Transformers with the Delta Rule over Sequence Length](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06484/) (2024)
- [Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26692/) (2025)
- [HGRN2: Gated Linear RNNs with State Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07904/) (2024)
- [Going Beyond Linear Transformers with Recurrent Fast Weight Programmers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06295/) (2021)
- [Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling using State Space Principles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15569/) (2026)
- [Gated Slot Attention for Efficient Linear-Time Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07146/) (2024)
- [Just read twice: closing the recall gap for recurrent language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.05483/) (2024)
- [Gated DeltaNet-2: Decoupling Erase and Write in Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22791/) (2026)
- [Comba: Improving Bilinear RNNs with Closed-loop Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02475/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Linear attention models have emerged as efficient alternatives to standard attention, but effectively managing their fixed-size recurrent memory remains challenging. To improve memory, recent work has explored two distinct directions: delta-rule variants for precise correction of values associated with keys, and slot-based architectures such as Gated Slot Attention for modeling key and value memories in two stages. We observe that these directions are complementary--the delta rule provides effective memory correction, while the two-stage structure provides a natural way to operate on both sides of an association. Building on this insight, we introduce a new Gated Oja Rule for key-side correction and extend it with decoupled erase and write control to obtain Gated Oja Rule-2. We then introduce Gated Slot Attention-2 (GSA2), which combines Gated Oja Rule-2 for key-side correction with Gated Delta Rule-2 for value-side correction through shared latent slots. We further derive a hardware-efficient chunkwise algorithm for parallel training. Experiments demonstrate that GSA2 consistently improves over strong linear-attention baselines across benchmarks while retaining linear-time sequence modeling and constant-memory recurrent decoding.