Screening Is Enough
We call query--key relevance absolute when its values lie on a fixed bounded scale, depend on neither competing keys nor sequence length, require no sequence-length-dependent calibration, and can all be zero. To realize this notion, we introduce screening, whose explicit threshold transforms bounded query--key similarities into relevance values, enabling exact rejection, empty selection, and direct inspection on a common scale. In a controlled comparison of 12 attention mechanisms on a matched Transformer backbone, only screening maintains both low long-context perplexity and robust retrieval beyond the training context; notably, it does so without inference-time scaling. Building on scre...
| Authors | Ken M. Nakanishi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 1 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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