{"paper":{"title":"Depth-Staggered Fibonacci Spacing for Sparse Attention: Static Schedules Beat Learned Dilation and Extrapolate Where Dense Attention Fails","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Chad A. Capps","submitted_at":"2026-06-26T19:28:48Z","abstract_excerpt":"We study sparse self-attention in which each query attends to a dense local window plus a set of Fibonacci-spaced offsets, with a per-layer scalar alpha that compresses or expands the spacing. Across 21 language models trained under one matched recipe (60M parameters, 512 hidden, 16 layers, 426M tokens), we compare four ways of setting alpha across depth: fixed, per-layer learned, a static linear stagger, and a coprime (anti-gridding) reassignment of that stagger, together with a reach-matched power-of-2 control. Three results stand out. First, a static per-layer stagger improves perplexity ov"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2606.28560","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2606.28560/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}