arxivcs.LGcs.AIcs.CL2026-07-20
A Controlled Study of Attention-Only Transformers
Henry Ndubuaku, Karen Mosoyan, Jakub Mroz, Noah Cylich, Satyajit Kumar, Parkirat Sandhu, et al.
Feed-forward networks hold two thirds of a transformer's non-embedding parameters, yet the architecture has not received a necessity test that controls parameters, compute, and depth at once. We pretrain attention-only decoder transformers (Simple Attention Networks, SANs) agains…