Forget Attention: Importance-Aware Attention Is All You Need

Suhyeong Shin; Yeongwook Yang

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arXiv · 2606.02332

Forget Attention: Importance-Aware Attention Is All You Need

Suhyeong Shin·Yeongwook Yang

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Abstract

Combining attention's global retrieval with the sequential importance signal of state space models (SSMs) is the open challenge of hybrid language modeling. Transformers see everywhere but cannot prioritize; SSMs know what matters but cannot revisit. Existing hybrids -- Jamba (block level) and Hymba (head level) -- place the two in separate compartments, so neither informs the other during the attention computation itself. We propose SISA (SSM-Informed Softmax Attention), which adds an SSM-derived importance term directly inside the attention score and realizes the full operation as a single SDPA call on augmented query/key vectors -- no recurrent state, no custom kernel. At 152M / 5B tokens, SISA reaches LAMBADA-greedy 17.3% (vs. Transformer 13.9 and Mamba-3 15.5) and attains NIAH 100% from step 1K, 7x faster than Transformer's retrieval convergence; at 369M, Mamba-3 leads LAMBADA while SISA preserves perfect NIAH and stock-SDPA execution. SISA thus defines a third design axis for SSM-attention hybrids -- score-level fusion -- beyond the block-level and head-level paradigms that have dominated the field.

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Suhyeong Shin, Yeongwook Yang. 2026-06-01. Forget Attention: Importance-Aware Attention Is All You Need. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02332

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