GRT Architecture: Halves Params to Match GPT-2 Performance

burny_tech · x · 2026-08-30

The paper proposes 'Gated Recurrent Transformers (GRT)', decoupling depth from parameter count by reusing a small shared Transformer core. It uses a gate conditioned on the hidden state to modulate updates, allowing the same weights to exhibit different behaviors at different depths. Experiments show a 3-layer GRT matches a 12-layer GPT-2 Small under isoFLOPs. Large models reduce parameters by 62% and peak decoding memory by 59%. Recurrence depth also serves as an inference-time compute hyperparameter.

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