Position-Agnostic Pre-Projection for Transformer Attention: Nonlinear Feature Construction and Content Skip Before Q/K/V

We propose two complementary modifications to transformer attention blocks. First, a non-linear pre-projection MLP is inserted between layer norm and Q/K/V projections, constructing richer features in a position-agnostic manner before any positional encoding is applied. Second, a content skip connection routes the pre-projection's features around the attention mechanism, allowing content information to bypass position-aware attention where beneficial. In frozen-probe experiments on Pythia-160M and 410M, the combined approach achieves the strongest results across methods: +40.6% LAMBADA accuracy and -39% perplexity at 160M scale. Learned skip connection weights reveal a consistent pattern ...

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