Gated Attention

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7 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 20

Sep 29, 2026cs.CL

How Local Mixing Encodes Relative Position in Global NoPE Attention

The attention operation is naively position invariant. However, positional information is fundamental to natural language, and therefore a variety of explicit position encodings have been developed in transformer-based models, such as rotary position encoding (RoPE). Although explicit position encodings have long been assumed to be required, recent methods that interleave local mixing layers, such as sliding window attention (SWA) and gated linear attention, while not encoding position (NoPE) in global attention layers has recently been shown to be successful at scale. How and why this approach works is not well-understood. In this paper, we develop an explanation of how hybrid models of this sort can implicitly encode position at global NoPE layers. Supported by both theoretical and empirical evidence, our central argument is that SWA and gated linear attention induce a recency bias in the residual stream that propagates to, and is selected by, the global attention logits. Moreover, in contrast to the implicit position encodings found in models with only global NoPE attention, in which positional information arises solely from the causal mask, the recency bias in hybrid models can be maintained across long sequences. In addition to deepening our understanding of how hybrid models encode position, these findings may provide insights for how to encode position in a way that can extrapolate to longer sequence lengths indefinitely.

Cutter Dawes, Nick Alonso, Tom Figliolia +1

Zyphra Research

Gated Attention Positional Encoding Sliding-Window Attention Hybrid Attention

Sep 28, 2026cs.CL

MS-GLA: Multi-Scale Gated Linear Attention for Addressing Representational Bottlenecks via Multi-Temporal Resolution

Gated Linear Attention (GLA) Transformers advance linear recurrent models through data-dependent gating, but face a core limitation: the fixed-capacity memory matrices across all heads operate at a single temporal resolution, where each token is processed individually, forcing them to simultaneously encode local syntactic patterns and long-range semantic structure, creating a representational bottleneck that gating alone is insufficient to resolve. We introduce Multi-Scale Gated Linear Attention (MS-GLA), which addresses this by distributing attention heads across multiple temporal resolutions. Coarser resolutions pool longer token spans naturally specializing toward long-range dependencies, while finer head groups retain sensitivity to local syntactic structure. A learnable, input-dependent fusion layer dynamically recombines head group outputs at each timestep, expanding effective memory capacity without increasing per-head state size. This multi-resolution decomposition draws on principles from Multi-Scale State-Space Models (MS-SSM), adapting them to the gated linear attention setting. We evaluate MS-GLA on language modeling, recall-intensive tasks, and long-context generalization. Across all settings, MS-GLA consistently achieves higher accuracy and lower perplexity than GLA at matched parameter counts, with up to 18.9% improvement on recall-intensive tasks and 9.5% lower average perplexity on language modeling benchmarks, validating multi-temporal resolution decomposition as a principled and effective extension of Gated Linear Attention.

Prasoon Dev, Anirudh Sankar, Vasudeva Varma

Language Technologies Research Center International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Long-Context Language Modeling Gated Attention Linear Attention Multi-Scale Attention

Sep 28, 2026cs.CV

TSGate: Timestep-Aware Gated Attention for Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have emerged as the dominant architecture for high-fidelity image and video generation. Recent DiT systems increasingly use structured prompts for training, improving caption quality and prompt adherence. However, their generation quality can degrade severely under out-of-domain (OOD) prompts, including the free-form descriptions supplied by users at inference time. Although LLM-based rewriting can convert these prompts into structured formats, it does not guarantee that the rewritten prompts align with the training distribution. Our analysis links this degradation to attention sinks and reduced early-step image-to-text attention and shows that sink suppression alone is insufficient to restore generation quality. Despite effective sink suppression, models trained with standard gated attention exhibit reduced early-step image-to-text attention and suboptimal generation quality. Based on these insights, we propose Timestep-Aware Gated Attention (TSGate), which injects a timestep-conditioned bias into the gate signal so that gating behavior adapts across denoising steps. Extensive experiments show that TSGate consistently outperforms both the baseline and standard gated attention across multiple benchmarks, improving the raw-prompt DPG score by 9.5% over the baseline.

Boyu Zhang, Yifan Liu, Shuxia Lin +3

Alibaba Token Hub, Alibaba Group · Southeast University

Diffusion Transformer Gated Attention T2I Generation Attention Control in Diffusion Models Attention Mechanisms T2I Diffusion Models

Sep 22, 2026cs.CV

GTR: Gated Token Recurrence for Efficient Dense Prediction

Self-attention-based vision backbones perform well on dense prediction, but the quadratic computational cost of global softmax attention limits their efficiency as image resolution increases. We introduce Gated Token Recurrence (GTR), a softmax-free recurrent vision backbone that combines gated linear attention, alternating spatial scan directions, and spatially enhanced SwiGLU blocks. GTR is distilled from a detection-specialized DINOv3 teacher using only final-layer patch-token alignment through a linear projection and squared

\ell_2

loss, without masked-token prediction or intermediate-layer supervision. With Objects365 detector pre-training, GTR-L achieves 58.9 box AP on COCO \texttt{val2017} with 1.908,ms median batch-one latency under compiled FP16 execution on an RTX4090. The same backbone also transfers to instance segmentation, pose estimation, oriented detection, semantic segmentation, and monocular depth estimation. In an isolated kernel benchmark, our specialized chunkwise CUDA operator is $4.0\times$ faster than FLA v0.5.0 at 1.6K tokens on RTX4090. TensorRT deployment on DRIVE AGX Thor achieves 2.282--8.769,ms median batch-one latency across the evaluated models. These results show that recurrent token mixing can provide an efficient alternative to global softmax attention for high-resolution dense prediction and edge deployment. Project page: https://intellindust-ai-lab.github.io/projects/GTR/

Zhe Feng, Longfei Liu, Wei Liu +7

Didi International Business Group · Intellindust AI Lab · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences +2

Efficient Neural Network Inference Gated Attention Edge Inference Recurrent Transformers Efficient ViTs Linear Attention+1

Sep 18, 2026cs.CV

Rethinking Vision Architectures with Gated Linear Attention and KAN

Vision Transformers devote most of their parameters to MLPs for channel mixing, but still rely on quadratic multi-head self-attention for token interactions. While linear attention fixes the complexity problem, bringing it down to O(N), it is usually just paired with the same fixed-activation MLP as before. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks take a different approach, placing learnable univariate functions on the edges instead. However, existing vision KANs either retain standard attention or remove attention entirely, so the two ideas have not been effectively combined. We introduce LKAT (Linear Kolmogorov-Arnold Transformer) to close this gap: an isotropic ViT-style encoder that couples chunk-wise Gated Linear Attention with a two-layer KAN feed-forward block, backed by an I/O-aware fused RBF-KAN kernel to make radial-basis grid functions efficient in practice. Under a shared DeiT-style training recipe, LKAT-B outperforms ViT-B/16, ViT-5-B, and Mixer-B/16 on ImageNet-100, while Tiny, Small, and Base variants scale consistently on CIFAR-10/100. ImageNet-100 pretraining also transfers effectively to CIFAR fine-tuning, suggesting that gated linear attention and KAN-based radial basis functions provide complementary inductive biases for mid-scale visual representation learning. Code: https://github.com/mehizelali/linear-kan-transformer

Ali Mehizel, Oussama Khaldi

Department of Applied Statistics, ENSSEA, Kolea, Tipaza, Algeria

Visual Representation Learning Vision Transformer Gated Attention Efficient ViTs Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks Linear Attention+1

Sep 18, 2026cs.LG

Abstention and Noise Filtering: Two Missing Primitives of Softmax Attention

Softmax attention has two structural gaps. A head cannot abstain, because its weights sum to one, so it outputs something even when nothing is relevant. Nor can it filter what it reads, because its output is a weighted average of value vectors, passing interference as faithfully as signal. We call these missing primitives abstention and noise filtering. Recent studies report that gating the value pathway improves pretraining but attribute the gain to different causes. We show that a value gate partly supplies both primitives, which unifies the reported causes as views of one gain. We give each primitive its own mechanism in matched models of 10M to 350M parameters and measure what each contributes. The gain from gating is almost entirely abstention at 10M, whereas by 350M filtering contributes as much as abstention, so what a study observes depends on its scale. The two benefits are largely additive, with a small overlap. A gate determined by each value alone leaves the attention sink in place, whereas a query-controlled mechanism removes it. Injecting interference into the value reads shows that abstention and filtering protect against it in distinguishable ways. The same patterns appear in pretrained models up to 20B parameters.

Richard Zhe Wang

St. John Fisher University, Rochester, New York, USA.

Softmax Attention Gated Attention

Sep 8, 2026cs.CL

Do New Attention Mechanisms Actually Fix Attention Sinks at Million-Token Context?

Long context language models now advertise windows of one million tokens, but two habits limit how much of that window is used. Attention heads with nothing useful to read still spend their budget on the first token, which is called the attention sink, and where a fact sits in the context changes whether the model finds it. Gated attention cut first token attention from 46.7 percent to 4.8 percent at NeurIPS 2025, and Kimi K3 pairs that idea with Kimi Delta Attention and Attention Residuals behind a one million token window, eight times past the range where these diagnostics have been reported. This paper asks whether the fix survives that jump. We build SinkProbe, a suite that measures sink mass, massive activation, position resolved recall and the recency gap, and apply it to four small models that differ only in how they mix tokens and depth. Three results follow. The training objective produces the sink, not the architecture. Gating did not reproduce its published effect at our scale. Sink mass, activations and position bias moved independently. Code, data and the measurement protocol are released at https://github.com/sararizwan7/Attention-Mechanisms-in-1M-Context-Window

Sara Rizwan, Samaanah Abdus Salam

Shadan Women’s College of Engineering and Technology Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Long-Context Language Model Evaluation Long-Context Language Modeling Gated Attention Transformer Attention Attention Sinks Attention Mechanisms

Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

Liquid Gated Attention

Real-world time series often exhibit irregular sampling and extended temporal horizons, requiring models to capture continuous-time dynamics across arbitrary intervals without prohibitive scaling costs. Discrete-time methods collapse variable time intervals into static positional steps; solver-dependent continuous-time models preserve temporal structure but rely on sequential integration, precluding parallelization; and solver-free approximations avoid this cost yet none couples observed time intervals with input-driven state modulation. We propose Liquid Gated Attention (LGA), a solver-free parallel temporal operator. By parameterizing an input-driven gating mechanism with observed time intervals, LGA introduces a continuous-time inductive bias and formulates hidden state evolution as a fast-weight associative memory, enabling parallel computation across the temporal dimension. Using matrix associativity in non-causal encoding and a prefix scan in causal encoding, LGA attains linear temporal complexity in sequence length in both modes. A sequence-level normalization bounds cumulative temporal decay for stable long-horizon optimization. Building on LGA, we instantiate LFormer, a modular backbone for continuous-time representation learning. Across six tasks and sixteen datasets spanning up to 17,984 steps, LFormer demonstrates long-range dependency modeling, fine-grained state tracking, and trajectory reconstruction from sparse and noisy observations, while delivering competitive performance against state-of-the-art discrete-time and continuous-time baselines with linear scaling efficiency.

Yiheng Jiang, Yuanbo Xu, Yongjian Yang

Mobile Intelligent Computing Laboratory, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, China

Gated Attention Linear Attention Temporal Attention Time Series Representation Learning

Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

Hybrid Gated Attention

Gated attention is an effective approach to mitigate attention sinks and enhance the representational capacity of attention. To further extend its effectiveness-efficiency Pareto frontier, we propose a Hybrid Gated Attention (HyGA) framework that contains three types of gating strategies. Specifically, these gates leverage diverse information from multiple stages of attention, and collaboratively build element-wise/head-wise gating from multiple perspectives, capturing intra-head and cross-head information interactions. Through our hybrid gating components, HyGA could provide multi-source modulation signals, enabling more comprehensive control over information flow and improving the representational capacity of attention. We also introduce low-rank matrix decomposition and learnable attention sink to further enhance training efficiency and stability. In experiments, we evaluate HyGA on widely-used benchmarks based on different backbones. The experimental results show that our HyGA comprehensively improves both training loss and various downstream performances compared with Gated attention. HyGA has also been verified to achieve the best performance at different computation costs, with comprehensive model analyses for better understanding. The proposed HyGA sheds light on a more effective, efficient, and stable attention mechanism.

Zekun Zhou, Ruobing Xie, Lanrui Wang +1

Tencent Hunyuan · Peking University

Low-Rank Matrix Decomposition Gated Attention Transformer Attention Efficient Attention Attention Sinks Hybrid Attention

Jun 25, 2026cs.SD

WQ-Fusion: Dynamic Gated Attention for Cross-Domain Audio Representation

While pre-trained models excel in specialized tasks, learning universal representations across diverse acoustic domains remains challenging. To address this, we propose WQ-Fusion, a robust dual-encoder framework for cross-domain audio representation learning. Overcoming the limitations of static concatenation, WQ-Fusion integrates whisper and qwen via an Adaptive Feature Modulation module and a novel element-wise gated attention mechanism. This design enables dynamic feature selection, allowing the model to selectively emphasize relevant acoustic and semantic dimensions. Extensive experiments on the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge (Track A) benchmark demonstrate that by effectively routing heterogeneous information, WQ-Fusion achieves a superior overall score of 0.836, significantly outperforming the strongest single-encoder baseline.

Mingda Lin, Lei Ding, Xinyue Zhou +6

School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China · Tencent AI Lab Seattle, Seattle, USA · CIAIC, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China +1

Audio Representation Learning Gated Attention Audio-Language Models Transformer Attention Feature Fusion

May 28, 2026cs.LG

Gated Graph Attention Networks with Learnable Temperature

Graph attention networks learn neighbor importance through data-dependent coefficients, but standard layers lack explicit control over unreliable feature dimensions and use fixed sharpness of attention coefficient distributions. This paper proposes gated graph attention and learnable temperature for common graph attention mechanisms. Gated graph attention filters feature or message responses to reduce the influence of unreliable dimensions, while learnable temperature dynamically adjusts the sharpness of the attention coefficient distribution. Experiments on homogeneous and heterophilic heterogeneous benchmarks show that the proposed variants consistently improve the corresponding graph attention backbones, and controlled noise studies further verify their behavior under feature perturbations. Theoretical analysis explains these results by showing that gating improves robustness when only part of the feature coordinates are reliable, while temperature is beneficial when global noise weakens the discriminability of node features.

Zhongtian Ma, Hao Wu, Yexin Zhang +2

School of Cybersecurity, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China · Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Shanghai 200232, China

Graph Attention Networks Graph Neural Networks Gated Attention Attention Mechanisms

May 25, 2026cs.LG

Energy-Gated Attention and Wavelet Positional Encoding: Complementary Inductive Biases for Transformer Attention

Standard transformer attention computes pairwise token similarity but treats all tokens as equally salient and all positions as equally local, regardless of the informational structure of the input. We identify two complementary inductive biases that standard attention lacks: energy salience (which tokens concentrate informational energy, learned end-to-end without explicit frequency decomposition) and scale-selective locality (how far positional influence extends at each frequency, implemented via Morlet wavelet encoding). We address both with two simple components. Energy-Gated Attention (EGA) gates value aggregation by a learned energy estimate of key token embeddings, computed via a single linear projection; it selects what to attend to. Morlet Positional Encoding (MoPE) replaces fixed sinusoidal encodings with learned Gaussian-windowed wavelets that adapt the joint position-frequency localization to the corpus; it specifies where attention operates at each scale. On TinyShakespeare, EGA alone achieves +0.092 validation loss improvement over standard attention (+0.103 over Phase 1-3 baseline); MoPE alone is -0.032 (below baseline as a standalone encoding); but their combination achieves +0.119 -- more than the sum of parts. This superadditivity, observed across two independent training runs, is the central empirical finding: salience and locality are complementary inductive biases, each addressing a gap the other cannot fill alone. Ablations confirm that structured spectral priors (Morlet wavelet gates, scale-initialized heads, fixed sinusoidal PE) consistently underperform their unconstrained learned counterparts, while complementary learned components interact superadditively. All experiments are at small scale (<=6M parameters, character-level benchmarks, single seed); larger-scale multi-seed validation is the most important direction for future work.

Athanasios Zeris

Independent Researcher, Athens, Greece.

Self-Attention Gated Attention Transformer Attention Positional Encoding Attention Mechanisms

May 21, 2026cs.LG

Energy-Gated Attention: Spectral Salience as an Inductive Bias for Transformer Attention

Standard transformer attention computes pairwise similarity between queries and keys, treating all tokens as equally salient regardless of their intrinsic informational content. In turbulent fluid dynamics, coherent structures -- the energetically dominant, spatially organized patterns that persist amid background chaos -- carry a disproportionate fraction of total energy and govern all transport. We propose that tokens play an analogous role in transformer attention: informationally dense positions (morphological boundaries, syntactic heads, discourse markers) concentrate spectral energy and should attract proportionally more attention than background tokens (function words, repeated patterns, low-information filler). We propose Energy-Gated Attention (EGA): a simple modification that gates value aggregation by the spectral energy of key token embeddings, computed by a single learned linear projection that discovers the dominant spectral mode of the embedding field. On TinyShakespeare, EGA achieves +0.103 validation loss improvement with only 12,480 additional parameters (<0.26% overhead) and no measurable computational cost. The result is consistent on Penn Treebank (+0.101), demonstrating dataset independence. A systematic ablation across three wavelet families (fixed Morlet, Daubechies db2/db4, and a parametric Morlet) establishes that fixed structured bases are suboptimal -- the optimal energy direction is data-adaptive and non-sinusoidal -- while identifying learned wavelet packets as a promising open direction. The learned energy threshold converges to tau ~= 0.35 independently of initialization, corresponding to the fraction (~36%) of tokens carrying above-average spectral energy in English text, a stable linguistic property consistent with the fraction of content words in running English text.

Athanasios Zeris

Independent Researcher, Athens, Greece.

Self-Attention Gated Attention Transformer Attention Language Modeling Attention Mechanisms

May 15, 2026cs.LG

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 DeltaNet models, while pure Gated Attention requires at least a polynomial scratchpad.

Tomasz Steifer

Centre for Credible AI Warsaw University of Technology Rektorska 4, Warszawa 00-614, Poland

Gated Attention Recurrent Transformers Language Modeling Gated Delta Networks Hybrid Attention

May 7, 2026cs.LG

Budgeted Attention Allocation: Cost-Conditioned Compute Control for Efficient Transformers

Transformers usually expose one inference cost per trained model, while deployed systems often need multiple cost-quality operating points. We study Budgeted Attention Allocation, a monotone head-gating mechanism conditioned on a requested attention budget. Dense warm-starting is important for stability: on a robust synthetic sequence task, one budgeted model reaches 99.7% accuracy at 0.303 estimated attention cost and 100.0% accuracy at 0.504 cost. On held-out AG News with a custom word-level transformer, hard-gate adaptation turns soft cost control into measured single-thread CPU speed, reaching 82.1% accuracy with 1.28x speedup at budget 0.50. In pretrained BERT-Mini AG News, budgeted structural pruning reaches 87.6% accuracy with 1.20x speedup at budget 0.50; a validation-ranked zero-shot dense post-hoc structural baseline reaches 86.1%, and one recovery epoch raises that per-budget specialist to 87.9%. On DBpedia14, BERT-Mini budgeted gates reach 97.4% at exact budget 0.50 versus 96.6% for dense full attention. Static fixed-budget gates and recovered dense specialists remain strong. The contribution is therefore not universal dominance, but a reproducible feasibility study of one controllable checkpoint across budgets that can trade attention cost for accuracy and be converted into measured structural speedups on small CPU benchmarks.

Amrit Nidhi

Independent Researcher

Efficient Transformer Inference Self-Attention Gated Attention Cost-Aware Inference Efficient Attention Multi-Head Attention

Apr 29, 2026cs.CV

GateMOT: Q-Gated Attention for Dense Object Tracking

While large models demonstrate the strong representational power of vanilla attention, this core mechanism cannot be directly applied to Dense Object Tracking: its quadratic all-to-all interactions are computationally prohibitive for dense motion estimation on high-resolution features. This mismatch prevents Dense Object Tracking from fully leveraging attention-based modeling in crowded and occlusion-heavy scenes. To address this challenge, we introduce GateMOT, an online tracking framework centered on Q-Gated Attention (Q-Attention), an efficient and spatially aware attention variant. Our key idea is to repurpose the Query from a similarity-conditioning term into a learnable gating unit. This Gating-Query (Gating-Q) produces a probabilistic gate that modulates Key features in an element-wise manner, enabling explicit relevance selection instead of costly global aggregation. Built on this mechanism, parallel Q-Attention heads transform one shared feature map into task-specific yet consistent representations for detection, motion, and re-identification, yielding a tightly coupled multi-task decoder with linear-complexity gating operations. GateMOT achieves state-of-the-art HOTA of 48.4, MOTA of 67.8, and IDF1 of 64.5 on BEE24, and demonstrates strong performance on additional Dense Object Tracking benchmarks. These results show that Q-Attention is a simple, effective, and transferable building block for attention-based tracking in dense tracking scenarios.

Mingjin Lv, Zelin Liu, Feifei Shao +4

Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China · Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

Visual Object Tracking Gated Attention Efficient Attention Attention Mechanisms Multi-Object Tracking

Apr 23, 2026cs.AI

Tool Attention Is All You Need: Dynamic Tool Gating and Lazy Schema Loading for Eliminating the MCP/Tools Tax in Scalable Agentic Workflows

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become a common interface for connecting large language model (LLM) agents to external tools, but its reliance on stateless, eager schema injection imposes a hidden per-turn overhead the MCP Tax or Tools Tax that practitioner reports place between roughly 10k and 60k tokens in typical multi-server deployments. This payload inflates the key-value cache, is associated with reasoning degradation as context utilization approaches published fracture points around 70%, and turns token budgets into a recurring operational cost. We introduce Tool Attention, a middleware-layer mechanism that generalizes the "Attention Is All You Need" paradigm from self-attention over tokens to gated attention over tools. Tool Attention combines (i) an Intent Schema Overlap (ISO) score from sentence embeddings, (ii) a state-aware gating function enforcing preconditions and access scopes, and (iii) a two-phase lazy schema loader that keeps a compact summary pool in context and promotes full JSON schemas only for top-k gated tools. We evaluate on a simulated 120-tool, six-server benchmark whose per-server token counts are calibrated to public audits of real MCP deployments. In this simulation, Tool Attention directly reduces measured per-turn tool tokens by 95.0% (47.3k -> 2.4k) and raises effective context utilization (a token-ratio quantity) from 24% to 91%. End-to-end figures for task success, latency, cost, and reasoning quality are reported as projections derived from the measured token counts combined with published deployment telemetry; they are not measured on live LLM agents, and we mark projected values explicitly throughout. Taken together, the results support a simple thesis: protocol-level efficiency, not raw context length, is a binding constraint on scalable gentic systems. The code for this work is accessible at https://github.com/asadani/tool-attention

Anuj Sadani, Deepak Kumar

Gated Attention LLM Tool Use Tool-Using Language Agents LLM Context Management

Apr 19, 2026cs.LG

Capacity-Controlled Global Attention for Graph Transformers

Global self-attention drives modern graph transformers, yet the softmax at its core imposes a structural constraint rarely examined directly: every attention row is non-negative and sums to one, so each per-head output is a mass-conserving convex combination of value vectors. A node can never "attend to nothing." We argue this conservation constraint is a single root cause behind three pathologies usually studied in isolation: the collapse of node representations with depth (over-smoothing), a low-rank bottleneck on per-head outputs, and brittle optimization in deep stacks. Drawing on how sigmoid gating removes analogous attention sinks in language models, we introduce SigGate-GT, a graph transformer that applies a learned, per-head, input-conditioned sigmoid gate to the attention output inside the GraphGPS framework. The gate is a smooth, per-dimension "volume control" that can drive head outputs toward zero, relaxing the constraint without abandoning attention's probabilistic interpretation. Analytically and through synthetic experiments, we show the gate strictly increases the stable rank of per-head outputs, and connect this rank gain to all three manifestations. On five molecular and long-range benchmarks, SigGate-GT matches the prior best on ZINC (0.059 MAE), records the strongest result among the graph-transformer baselines we evaluate on ogbg-molhiv (82.47% ROC-AUC), and is competitive on ogbg-molpcba and the Long-Range Graph Benchmark, with statistically significant gains over GraphGPS on all five datasets (p < 0.05). Mechanism analyses confirm the diagnosis: gating slows over-smoothing (a 30% mean relative gain in representation diversity across 4-16 layers), keeps attention entropy from collapsing, and stabilizes training across a 10x learning-rate range, at about 1% parameter overhead on OGB and under 3% wall-clock cost.

Yang Liu, Dongxin Guo, Tom Zheng +3

Brain Investing Limited Hong Kong, China · The University of Hong Kong Hong Kong, China · Stellaris AI Limited Hong Kong, China

Gated Attention Transformer Attention Graph Transformer

Apr 16, 2026cs.LG

Gating Enables Curvature: A Geometric Expressivity Gap in Attention

Multiplicative gating is widely used in neural architectures and has recently been applied to attention layers to improve performance and training stability in large language models. Despite the success of gated attention, the mathematical implications of gated attention mechanisms remain poorly understood. We study attention through the geometry of its representations by modeling outputs as mean parameters of Gaussian distributions and analyzing the induced Fisher--Rao geometry. We show that ungated attention operator is restricted to intrinsically flat statistical manifolds due to its affine structure, while multiplicative gating enables non-flat geometries, including positively curved manifolds that are unattainable in the ungated setting. These results establish a geometric expressivity gap between ungated and gated attention. Empirically, we show that gated models exhibit higher representation curvature and improved performance on tasks requiring nonlinear decision boundaries whereas they provide no consistent advantage on tasks with linear decision boundaries. Furthermore, we identify a structured regime in which curvature accumulates under composition, yielding a systematic depth amplification effect.

Satwik Bathula, Anand A. Joshi

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of Southern California

Information Geometry Neural Representation Geometry Self-Attention Gated Attention Transformer Attention Attention Mechanisms+1

Feb 11, 2026cs.LG

Routing Absorption in Sparse Attention: Why Random Gates Are Hard to Beat

Learned gates can approximate sparse attention patterns on frozen transformers, yet provide limited benefit over random gates when trained jointly with the model. We investigate this difference in a controlled 31M-parameter transformer and attribute it to routing absorption: model representations co-adapt to the imposed mask, reducing the incremental benefit of learned routing. Four experiments characterize the phenomenon. Differentiable soft gating yields perplexities of 48.73 plus or minus 0.60 with learned gates and 49.83 plus or minus 0.04 with frozen random gates over three seeds. Hard top-k masking provides no gradient path to the gate scores in the tested implementation. Gates distilled onto co-adapted and dense-trained Q/K/V both achieve high F1 against oracle masks, but hard-mask deployment yields perplexities of 601.6 and 48.6, respectively. Stochastic mask training also leaves a substantial deployment penalty: dense evaluation yields 78.2 perplexity, compared with 37.3 for the dense baseline. Experiments on Qwen3-1.7B show that increasing the number of trainable attention layers reduces the gap between learned and random gates. We relate these results to co-adaptation in Mixture-of-Experts and propose parameter asymmetry between the gate and the model as a contributing mechanism. For the tested per-query, token-level gates, freezing the model provides stable routing targets and enables effective post-hoc sparsification. The results motivate random-routing controls and separate evaluation of routing quality and model adaptation in sparse attention methods.

Keston Aquino-Michaels

No Way Labs

Transformer Self-Attention Gated Attention Sparse Attention Attention Mechanisms