Linear Attention for Efficient Bidirectional Sequence Modeling
Arshia Afzal, Elias Abad Rocamora, Leyla Candogan, Pol Puigdemont, Francesco Tonin, Yongtao Wu, Mahsa Shoaran, Volkan Cevher
Linear Transformers and State Space Models have emerged as efficient alternatives to softmax Transformers for causal sequence modeling, enabling parallel training via matrix multiplication and efficient RNN-style inference. However, despite their success in causal tasks, no unified framework exists for applying Linear Transformers to bidirectional sequence modeling.We introduce LION, the first framework to systematically extend Linear Transformers to the bidirectional setting. LION generalizes three core representations commonly used in the causal case—full Linear Attention, bidirectional RNN, and chunkwise parallel form—to the bidirectional setting. These forms are theoretically equivalent and enable models to exploit the strengths of each during training and inference.We prove that a broad class of Linear Transformers can be extended using LION and validate our framework via three core examples based on the choice of decay type: LION-Lit, the bidirectional extension of Katharopoulos et al., 2020; LION-D, based on Sun et al., 2023; and LION-S, a variant using selective decay. Across standard bidirectional tasks, LION enables models to match or exceed the performance of softmax Transformers, while offering significantly faster training and more efficient inference than existing State Space Models.