# FON: A Draft-Revise Dual-Organ Language Model without Sequence-Level Quadratic Attention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.16301/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 50 of its 65 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.07843/) (2016)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.00396/) (2021)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [The LAMBADA dataset: Word prediction requiring a broad discourse context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06031/) (2016)
- [In-context Learning and Induction Heads](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11895/) (2022)
- [Large Language Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09992/) (2025)
- [RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13048/) (2023)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [Neural Turing Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1410.5401/) (2014)
- [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)
- [InCoder: A Generative Model for Code Infilling and Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05999/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Self-attention assigns two functions to one mechanism-where to read and how to mix-at the price of O(L^2) training, an O(T) decode state, and position signals bound to the training length. Existing attention-free alternatives all optimize the single function of generation. We propose FON (Fusion-Organ Network), which differentiates one weight stack into a drafting organ (multi-tap learnable delays + content-adaptive recursion; causal, O(S) training, O(1) decode state, no sequence-level quadratic attention) and a revision organ that re-processes the written prefix through multi-scale ripple kernels injected via weak gates, never generating. At 30M parameters, iso-parameter and iso-token budget, FON reaches perplexity 131.03 on WikiText-103, beating Transformer (197.73) and Mamba2 (152.53); the advantage persists under all depth-aligned baselines and at the 70M tier (-20.8%). At 8x length extrapolation FON degrades by ~8-9% without positional-encoding engineering, between ALiBi and RoPE. The revision channel provides a structural pathway for in-domain infilling that causal architectures lack in principle (+19% over on-demand coupling), at a perplexity cost indistinguishable within measurement precision. We report all costs and boundaries: impaired long-range retrieval, synthetic-task disadvantages, weaker out-of-domain code infilling than a same-recipe Transformer, and a 6.5-12.3x wall-clock gap.