Recent advancements in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have set new standards in natural language processing. However, the classical softmax attention incurs significant computational costs, leading to a complexity for per-token generation, where represents the context length. This work explores reducing LLMs' complexity while maintaining performance by introducing Rodimus and its enhanced version, Rodimus. Rodimus employs an innovative data-dependent tempered selection (DDTS) mechanism within a linear attention-based, purely recurrent framework, achieving significant accuracy while drastically reducing the memory usage typically associated with recurrent models. This method exemplifies semantic compression by maintaining essential input information with fixed-size hidden states. Building on this, Rodimus combines Rodimus with the innovative Sliding Window Shared-Key Attention (SW-SKA) in a hybrid approach, effectively leveraging the complementary semantic, token, and head compression techniques. Our experiments demonstrate that Rodimus-1.6B, trained on 1 trillion tokens, achieves superior downstream performance against models trained on more tokens, including Qwen2-1.5B and RWKV6-1.6B, underscoring its potential to redefine the accuracy-efficiency balance in LLMs. Model code and pre-trained checkpoints will be available soon.
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