Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning
The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length. To address this, we study SWARR (Sliding-Window Attention with Reinforced Adaptation for Math Reasoning), a practical recipe for adapting SWA models to mathematical reasoning. SWARR has two stages: (1) efficient conversion from a pretrained SA model to SWA with supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which avoids pretraining a new base model, and (2) policy adaptation with reinforcement learning (RL). We find that SWA still underperforms SA after SFT, and we hypothesize that this gap is caused in part by a dat...
| Authors | Kai Liu, Peijie Dong, Xinchen Xie et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 10 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 June 2026 |
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