Provably Shorter Scratchpads in Hybrid DeltaNet-Attention Decoders
We investigate the expressive power of hybrid recurrent-attention decoders, a class of architectures used in recent open-source language models such as Qwen3-Next and its successors. These models combine Gated Attention heads with recurrent Gated DeltaNet heads. Is there a formal advantage, in terms of model expressivity or efficiency, to such a hybrid architecture? We show that there is. We define parity-conditioned retrieval task and show that under constant-precision assumption, a Qwen-style hybrid of Gated DeltaNet and Gated Attention solves this task with a constant scratchpad, or equivalently $O(1)$ chain-of-thought steps. In contrast, no similar solution exists for pure Gated Delta...
| Authors | Tomasz Steifer |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 May 2026 |
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