RWKV-X: A Linear Complexity Hybrid Language Model

In this paper, we introduce RWKV-X, a novel hybrid architecture that combines the efficiency of RWKV for short-range modeling with a sparse attention mechanism designed to capture long-range context. Unlike previous hybrid approaches that rely on full attention layers and retain quadratic complexity, RWKV-X achieves linear-time complexity in training and constant-time complexity in inference decoding. We demonstrate that RWKV-X, when continually pretrained on 64K-token sequences, achieves near-perfect accuracy on the 64K passkey retrieval benchmark. It consistently outperforms prior RWKV-7 models on long-context benchmarks, while maintaining strong performance on short-context tasks. These results highlight RWKV-X as a scalable and efficient backbone for general-purpose language modeling, capable of decoding sequences up to 1 million tokens with stable speed and memory usage. To facilitate further research and analysis, we have made the checkpoints and the associated code publicly accessible at:this https URL.

@article{hou2025_2504.21463,
  title={ RWKV-X: A Linear Complexity Hybrid Language Model },
  author={ Haowen Hou and Zhiyi Huang and Kaifeng Tan and Rongchang Lu and Fei Richard Yu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.21463},
  year={ 2025 }
}