Sliding-window attention beats linear on long-context reasoning [R]

Excerpt

Sliding Window Attention with sinks, one of the simplest existing fixes for the quadratic-cost problem in LLMs, holds up as well or better than the linear-attention variants labs have been spending post-training compute to produce. That is the claim of a [new arXiv preprint]( https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28444 ) by Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker, Pashmina Cameron and Emy Gervais. On the long-context reasoning benchmarks the paper singles out, the gap is not close. "SWA achieves