
Linear attention mechanisms close quality gap on LLaMA and Qwen models
Researchers have isolated the core mechanisms that allow transformers to operate efficiently on long contexts by replacing quadratic self-attention with linear approximations. The work reveals that softmax attention relies on rank-1 orthogonal projections, explaining why delta-style state updates outperform simpler gating schemes. By introducing structural fixes like sink tokens and cache routing, the team closed the quality gap between linearized and standard attention. Validation across LLaMA and Qwen up to 32B parameters demonstrates this approach scales and beats existing post hoc linearization methods, directly addressing a major inference bottleneck for production LLM deployment.62






















