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Posted by westurner 8 hours ago

Attention Is Not What You Need (2025)(arxiv.org)
86 points | 31 comments
chiharukiryu 40 seconds ago|
lmao seems just computing power arms race >>> specific algorithm
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago||
The author describes the model's pairing operation as:

(zt,zt+Delta) where Delta is a positive offset.

This means the model is using the next token to predict the next token. It should have been (zt,zt-Delta), or it's cheating.

I don't know if that's just the paper, or if the code was also b0rk3d.

magicalhippo 2 hours ago|
That's not how I read it.

For each position t and offset Δ∈ such that t+Δ≤L, we form a pair (z_t,z_t+Δ).

For a given t, this produces up to m pairs:

(z_t,z_t+Δ_1),(z_t,z_t+Δ_2),….

We treat these as local neighborhoods at multiple scales. Note that the pairing is causal: we only pair t with positions strictly to its right (future), consistent with left-to-right language modeling.

So z_t is a token in the input, and z_t+Δ is some later token. Guess they could have flipped that around to (z_t-Δ, z_t) with t+Δ>=0.

mapontosevenths 1 hour ago||
> So z_t is a token in the input, and z_t+Δ is some later token.

I think you get what I'm saying, but when they compute the gate they do:

  h_t_new = alpha_t * h_t + (1 - alpha_t) * g_t
If I'm reading it right g_t = geometric_mix(z_t, z_(t+delta))

Which would mean that g_t includes t+Δ, which is a future token. It's leaking future tokens into the current math.

So it could just be a sign error and still be right in the code, or I could just be getting it wrong.

If I'm not though, and given that they got worse results than a standard transformer I really hope it's fixed in the code. If they do worse even when knowing the future it's bad news for the idea.

magicalhippo 39 minutes ago||
Fair point. If only the paper had a link to the code.

I found this[1] repo which tries to reproduce it, and its accompanying blog post[2] uses (z_t, z_t - delta), without further mention.

Another repo[3] trying to reproduce it also does the reverse from what I can see, so (current, past).

Interestingly the first repo got underwhelming results, while the second repo matched the paper roughly. Not sure if it's related to the Claude-usage or not in the first, though it notes a lot of details were left out of the paper which is true.

[1]: https://github.com/Infatoshi/grassmann-flows/

[2]: https://github.com/Infatoshi/grassmann-flows/blob/main/blog....

[3]: https://github.com/kanenorman/grassmann

charcircuit 6 hours ago||
Scale is all you need.

That's why you see other attention free large language models work. But in a world with constraints on time and compute the architecture does matter because scaling does have a cost (which is dropping)

dannyw 2 minutes ago||
Pretty much. See “Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models” https://arxiv.org/html/2001.08361v1

Compute, data, and parameter count are the three logarithmic values that correspond to model performance.

So if you find ways of improving training efficiency (the simplest conceptually is probably local/global sliding window attention like Gemma; the latest DeepSeek and Kimis have quite fancy ones), you will be able to have more effective compute, and train smarter models while keeping data and param count the same.

If you find this fascinating and want to dive more, I encourage checking out nanochat (solid GPT-2 repro); and trying to make architectural tweaks with a coding agent.

janalsncm 5 hours ago||
In Qwen 3.5, 75% of the layers are linear attention. I think the theory is that linear attention is usually enough, but some regular attention layers help to handle more sophisticated long-range relationships.
hujun236 5 hours ago||
[flagged]
gnabgib 8 hours ago||
(2025)
oofbey 3 hours ago||
They only demonstrate this idea on a laughably small toy problem. An 18M parameter model (which they call “moderate”) on an ancient dataset proves exactly nothing. Plenty of bad ideas appear to work at trivial scale.

Arguably the most important aspect of transformers is that it allowed easy training of arbitrarily large models.

themagyar 5 hours ago||
"subconscious" reasoning
Grimblewald 6 hours ago||
Interesting idea, but it reads like an LLM write up. For me to engage properly with your written work, I need to see human effort. There are too many half-baked ideas out there, and unless you, as the author, thought the idea is worth putting proper effort into communicating, why should I think of this anything other than something someone said in passing? One way you could communicate effort to me, and likely others, rather than this work looking like the output of some LLM, is to use graphs, schematics and figures to support claims. Metrics are extremely misleading, only really useful when we've verified what is being measured is what one assumes is being measured. Metrics on their own are often deeply bullshit, so without any kind of graphs of trends or other important qualities, I assume it's all LLM output, since LLM's will default to not plotting anything while humans tend to go the opposite way.

Also, more effort into completeness needs to go in. Perhaps it is in there, but you just report an "accuracy" without defining what that means. The more I look, the more it starts becoming apparent this likely hasn't received any real human over-sight at all. "What does Grassmann mixing actually buy us?" It buys nothing, because it is a concept, Claude.

Neat idea, but in my opinion devoid of critical thinking / analysis or the level of rigour required to be suitable for broader dissemination. I'd put effort into making this a more credible body of work ASAP. Slop like this WILL cripple your standing in the field.

porkshoe 5 hours ago||
This might sound like a joke, but your comment sounds LLM generated, and I'm going to assume it's all LLM output.
ghurtado 3 hours ago|||
I was gonna say "too pedantic even for an LLM" but then I got worried that it might be read as a compliment.
random3 3 hours ago|||
actually, I think you're right
helpyou840 5 hours ago||
> For me to engage properly with your written work, I need to see human effort

Agreed.

I say: “if you want a human response, then give human effort”

erickgabriel 5 hours ago||
Interesting...
jthomas1 6 hours ago|
interesting
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