Architecture ideas

Attention variants, state-space and recurrent cells, normalization and token-mixing schemes — each tested against the standard block it replaces.

✗ Mechanism failed 2026

Channel-aware attention-head pruning

Prune redundant attention heads using separate similarity scores for sink behavior and content routing. Two heads are considered safely redundant only when their normalized content compositions are close in Aitchison distance and their sink-mass trajectories are also close, avoiding pruning decisions dominated by a shared sink token.

Useful7/10
Difficulty4/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Which Question Is Your Attention Metric Answering? Attention Rows as Compositional Data arXiv:2608.14712
△ Mechanism confirmed, baseline not beaten 2026

Kernel-Prompted Random Transformer

Freeze a randomly initialized single-layer transformer and use a constructed soft prompt to make its attention weights equal Gaussian-kernel weights over support examples. The resulting model performs Nadaraya-Watson regression in one forward pass, so task adaptation stores prompt tokens rather than modifying network weights. Prompt length becomes the number of kernel centers, while hidden dimension and prompt norm determine whether the required logits can be represented accurately.

Useful7/10
Difficulty5/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Training-Free Universal Approximation by Prompting Random Transformers arXiv:2608.09558
Unverified 2026

Calibration-validated uncertainty-aware sparse routing

Replace a single plug-in top-k router decision with a confidence correspondence containing every router parameter candidate and sparse expert assignment that remains compatible with calibration and the current input. Project this set onto a hierarchy of expert groups and return the finest group-level decision supported by all surviving explanations; otherwise coarsen the route or abstain. Active endpoint bracketing evaluates only candidates that could still change the projected routing report.

Useful6/10
Difficulty6/10
Novelty7/10
Paper: Physical-Support Confidence Sets for Highly Coherent Dictionaries arXiv:2608.20295
Unverified 2026

Log-Rank Fluctuation Channels

Augment a causal sequence model with a small hierarchy of prefix summaries weighted by powers of the logarithmic rank of each preceding token. The summaries retain order-sensitive deviations from a baseline representation while costing O(KNd) for sequence length N, hierarchy width K, and hidden dimension d, instead of O(N^2d) dense attention.

Useful6/10
Difficulty4/10
Novelty6/10
Paper: A Logarithmic Fluctuation Hierarchy for Sequential Interacting Diffusions arXiv:2607.22470