FlashMorph formulates hybrid layer selection as budget-constrained optimization, trains per-layer gates on synthetic retrieval data with linearization regularization, then discretizes and distills to produce efficient hybrid architectures.
Liger: Linearizing large language models to gated recurrent structures.arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01496
5 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Transformers with linear recurrent modeling offer linear-time training and constant-memory inference. Despite their demonstrated efficiency and performance, pretraining such non-standard architectures from scratch remains costly and risky. The linearization of large language models (LLMs) transforms pretrained standard models into linear recurrent structures, enabling more efficient deployment. However, current linearization methods typically introduce additional feature map modules that require extensive fine-tuning and overlook the gating mechanisms used in state-of-the-art linear recurrent models. To address these issues, this paper presents Liger, short for Linearizing LLMs to gated recurrent structures. Liger is a novel approach for converting pretrained LLMs into gated linear recurrent models without adding extra parameters. It repurposes the pretrained key matrix weights to construct diverse gating mechanisms, facilitating the formation of various gated recurrent structures while avoiding the need to train additional components from scratch. Using lightweight fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Liger restores the performance of the linearized gated recurrent models to match that of the original LLMs. Additionally, we introduce Liger Attention, an intra-layer hybrid attention mechanism, which significantly recovers 93\% of the Transformer-based LLM at 0.02\% pre-training tokens during the linearization process, achieving competitive results across multiple benchmarks, as validated on models ranging from 1B to 8B parameters. Code is available at https://github.com/OpenSparseLLMs/Linearization.
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Delta-rule linear attention faithfully approximates softmax attention through key-dependent rank-1 projections, enabling efficient post-hoc linearization of LLMs up to 32B parameters.
Reinforcement learning after SFT conversion narrows the performance gap between sliding-window attention and full self-attention on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving linear complexity.
Kimi Linear hybridizes linear attention with a new KDA module to beat full attention on tasks while slashing KV cache by 75% and speeding decoding up to 6x.
This work systematically compares inter-layer and intra-layer hybridization strategies for combining self-attention and Mamba-style state space models, evaluating them on language modeling, downstream tasks, long-context performance, scaling, and efficiency to derive optimal design recipes.
citing papers explorer
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Morphing into Hybrid Attention Models
FlashMorph formulates hybrid layer selection as budget-constrained optimization, trains per-layer gates on synthetic retrieval data with linearization regularization, then discretizes and distills to produce efficient hybrid architectures.
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The Key to Going Linear: Analysis-Driven Transformer Linearization
Delta-rule linear attention faithfully approximates softmax attention through key-dependent rank-1 projections, enabling efficient post-hoc linearization of LLMs up to 32B parameters.
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Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning
Reinforcement learning after SFT conversion narrows the performance gap between sliding-window attention and full self-attention on math reasoning benchmarks while preserving linear complexity.
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Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture
Kimi Linear hybridizes linear attention with a new KDA module to beat full attention on tasks while slashing KV cache by 75% and speeding decoding up to 6x.
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Hybrid Architectures for Language Models: Systematic Analysis and Design Insights
This work systematically compares inter-layer and intra-layer hybridization strategies for combining self-attention and Mamba-style state space models, evaluating them on language modeling, downstream tasks, long-context performance, scaling, and efficiency to derive optimal design recipes.