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 causal attention


LoRATv2: Enabling Low-Cost Temporal Modeling in One-Stream Trackers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Transformer-based algorithms, such as LoRAT, have significantly enhanced objecttracking performance. However, these approaches rely on a standard attention mechanism, which incurs quadratic token complexity, making real-time inference computationally expensive. In this paper, we introduce LoRATv2, a novel tracking framework that addresses these limitations with three main contributions. First, LoRATv2 integrates frame-wise causal attention, which ensures full selfattention within each frame while enabling causal dependencies across frames, significantly reducing computational overhead. Moreover, key-value (KV) caching is employed to efficiently reuse past embeddings for further speedup.


LEDiT: Your Length-Extrapolatable Diffusion Transformer without Positional Encoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) struggle to generate images at resolutions higher than their training resolutions. The primary obstacle is that the explicit positional encodings (PE), such as RoPE, need extrapolating to unseen positions which degrades performance when the inference resolution differs from training. In this paper, We propose a Length-Extrapolatable Diffusion Transformer (LEDiT) to overcome this limitation. LEDiT needs no explicit PEs, thereby avoiding PE extrapolation. The key innovation of LEDiT lies in the use of causal attention. We demonstrate that causal attention can implicitly encode global positional information and show that such information facilitates extrapolation. We further introduce a locality enhancement module, which captures fine-grained local information to complement the global coarse-grained position information encoded by causal attention. Experimental results on both conditional and text-to-image generation tasks demonstrate that LEDiT supports up to 4 resolution scaling (e.g., from 256 256 to 512 512), achieving better image quality compared to the state-of-the-art length extrapolation methods. We believe that LEDiT marks a departure from the standard RoPE-based methods and offers a promising insight into length extrapolation.


OmniGen-AR: AutoRegressive Any-to-Image Generation

Neural Information Processing Systems

Autoregressive (AR) models have demonstrated strong potential in visual generation, offering competitive performance with simple architectures and optimization objectives. However, existing methods are typically limited to single-modality conditions, \eg, text or category labels, restricting their applicability in real-world scenarios that demand image synthesis from diverse forms of controls.


LEDiT: Your Length-Extrapolatable Diffusion Transformer without Positional Encoding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Diffusion transformers (DiTs) struggle to generate images at resolutions higher than their training resolutions. The primary obstacle is that the explicit positional encodings (PE), such as RoPE, need extrapolating to unseen positions which degrades performance when the inference resolution differs from training. In this paper, We propose a Length-Extrapolatable Diffusion Transformer (LEDiT) to overcome this limitation. LEDiT needs no explicit PEs, thereby avoiding PE extrapolation. The key innovation of LEDiT lies in the use of causal attention. We demonstrate that causal attention can implicitly encode global positional information and show that such information facilitates extrapolation. We further introduce a locality enhancement module, which captures fine-grained local information to complement the global coarse-grained position information encoded by causal attention. Experimental results on both conditional and text-to-image generation tasks demonstrate that LEDiT supports up to 4 resolution scaling (e.g., from 256$\times$256 to 512$\times$512), achieving better image quality compared to the state-of-the-art length extrapolation methods. We believe that LEDiT marks a departure from the standard RoPE-based methods and offers a promising insight into length extrapolation.


How Does Attention Help? Insights from Random Matrices on Signal Recovery from Sequence Models

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study the spectral properties of sample covariance matrices constructed from pooled sequence representations, where token embeddings are drawn from a fixed two-class Gaussian mixture table and pooled via (fixed) attention weights. Working in the high-dimensional regime $d,V,N\to\infty$ with $d/V\toฮด$ and $d/N\toฮณ$, we derive exact characterizations of the limiting eigenvalue distribution, outlier eigenvalues, and eigenvector alignment with the hidden signal. The bulk spectrum follows a non-Marchenko--Pastur law given by the free multiplicative convolution $ฮบ(MP_ฮด\boxtimes MP_ฮณ)$, reflecting the finite vocabulary structure. Signal recovery undergoes two successive BBP-type phase transitions characterized by the scalars: $ฮด,ฮณ,ฮฑ=w^{\top} R w$ and $ฮบ=\|w\|^2$, where $w$ denotes the attention pooling weights and $R$ the positional correlation matrix. An aftermath of our analysis demonstrates that the optimal attention weights maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio $ฮฑ/ฮบ$ are given by the (normalized) top eigenvector of $R$, and we show (as a particular case of our analysis) that parameter-free causal self-attention with $ฯ„/d$ score scaling yields deterministic harmonic weights that improve signal recovery over mean pooling whenever early tokens carry more signal. Extensive simulations confirm sharp agreement between theory and finite-dimensional experiments.


Self-Attention as Transport: Limits of Symmetric Spectral Diagnostics

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Large language models hallucinate in predictable ways: attention routing fails by over-concentrating on a narrow set of positions, or by spreading so diffusely that relevance is diluted, and the shape of the failure carries diagnostic signal. A widely used family of spectral methods analyzes the symmetric component of the degree-normalized attention operator, which governs transport capacity; we prove that every transpose-invariant spectral diagnostic of this operator is structurally orientation-blind (it cannot distinguish an operator from its transpose, and therefore cannot detect information-flow direction), with a quantitative converse establishing the asymmetry coefficient $G$ as the unique control parameter for direction. Pairing this with a closed-form bipartite-Cheeger landscape for canonical causal architectures, we show that uniform causal attention satisfies an $n$-independent floor $ฯ•\ge 1/5$ with worst cut at $t^\ast/n \approx 0.32$, while window attention pierces the floor as $O(w/n)$; failure modes are shape-different, not just value-different. The resulting two-axis diagnostic ($ฯ•$ for capacity, $G$ for direction) yields a falsifiable polarity prediction: bottleneck- and diffuse-dominated benchmarks should exhibit opposite polarity. Under length-controlled evaluation, transport features retain interpretable signal (LC-AUROC from 0.62 to 0.84) on tested models up to 8B parameters, with polarity reversing as predicted between HaluEval and MedHallu.




Think-at-Hard: Selective Latent Iterations to Improve Reasoning Language Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Improving reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially under parameter constraints, is crucial for real-world applications. Prior work proposes recurrent transformers, which allocate a fixed number of extra iterations per token to improve generation quality. After the first, standard forward pass, instead of verbalization, last-layer hidden states are fed back as inputs for additional iterations to refine token predictions. Yet we identify a latent overthinking phenomenon: easy token predictions that are already correct after the first pass are sometimes revised into errors in additional iterations. To address this, we propose Think-at-Hard (TaH), a dynamic latent thinking method that iterates deeper only at hard tokens. It employs a lightweight neural decider to trigger latent iterations only at tokens that are likely incorrect after the standard forward pass. During latent iterations, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules shift the LLM objective from general next-token prediction to focused hard-token refinement. We further introduce a duo-causal attention mechanism that extends attention from the token sequence dimension to an additional iteration depth dimension. This enables cross-iteration information flow while maintaining full sequential parallelism. Experiments show that TaH boosts LLM reasoning performance across five challenging benchmarks while maintaining the same parameter count. Compared with baselines that iterate twice for all output tokens, TaH delivers 8.1-11.3% accuracy gains while exempting 94% of tokens from the second iteration. Against strong single-iteration Qwen3 models finetuned with the same data, it also delivers 4.0-5.0% accuracy gains. When allowing less than 3% additional parameters from LoRA and the iteration decider, the gains increase to 8.5-12.6% and 5.3-5.4%, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/thu-nics/TaH.