Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures
Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training...
| Authors | Ziqing Qiao, Yinuo Xu, Chaojun Xiao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 13 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 June 2026 |
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