arXiv · 2606.15678
The Reservoir Attention Network: Cross-Pass State in Pretrained Transformers via Content-Addressable Reservoir Injection
Abstract
A feasibility and dynamics study of the Reservoir Attention Network (RAN), an architecture that injects a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir into the mid-layer attention of a pretrained transformer to carry state across forward passes. Experiments span GPT-2 (124M, 355M) to Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B) on a single consumer GPU. The tasks are minimal probes chosen to isolate individual mechanisms; the broader always-alive agent vision is treated throughout as compute-limited future work, not a claim of this paper. The reservoir is left untrained (fixed random) by design: this isolates whether untrained recurrent dynamics alone suffice to carry usable cross-pass state, leaving trained recurrence as a complementary, more expensive direction.
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Emma Leonhart. 2026-06-14. The Reservoir Attention Network: Cross-Pass State in Pretrained Transformers via Content-Addressable Reservoir Injection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.15678
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