Ask Self, Ask Others: Relation Is All You Need
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:Ask Self, Ask Others: Relation Is All You Need
Abstract:Attention directly derives normalized information flow from pairwise scores. We introduce Relation, an alternative token-mixing primitive that first organizes pairwise evidence into explicit Self and Exchange relations and derives information flow afterward. This relational organization gives rise to Full Relation, FlashRelation, Linear Relation, Hybrid Relation, and a KV-style Relation Cache. Across matched decoder-only models at approximately 10M, 30M, and 100M parameters, Full Relation achieves lower final validation NLL than MHA at all three scales. In a fixed-context reference benchmark, FlashRelation is 3.60-4.41x faster than the materialized Full Relation implementation. Across scale-matched production workloads, it reaches 76.4-84.9% of PyTorch FlashAttention throughput while executing the Full Relation operator. Hybrid Relation uses 75% Linear Relation layers and achieves strong language-modeling quality. These results support a relation-first view of token mixing: ask Self, ask Others, then let Flow follow Relation.
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.20172 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2608.20172v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.20172
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
SLM-Conditioned Hierarchical Relation Routing for Labeled Property Graph Learning
Aug 28
-
NeuronFuzz: Safety Neuron Guided Fuzzing for LLM Safety Evaluation
Aug 28
-
Pruning Binarized Neural Networks: A Dedicated Framework and Globally Weighted Algorithms
Aug 28
-
Muon with Finite Newton-Schulz: The Smoothing Benefit in Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization
Aug 28
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.