LSTM-Style Looped Transformers with Shared KV Caches

Overview & Synopsis

Recurrent transformers reuse weights to perform deep computation with fewer parameters. We study an LSTM-style transformer that also shares one key--value cache across its recurrent core. At width 1024, it uses 40.4% fewer parameters than an untied control at nearly matched forward FLOPs, and reduces persistent cache sets from fifteen to four. Parallel training supplies cache entries from a standard-attention pass, whereas continuation reads entries produced recursively using shared attention. We address this mismatch by aligning the two training passes' cache entries with a consistency loss during the final 10% of a fixed training-token budget. Across three model widths on FineWeb, this removes 81--89% of the continuation-loss penalty relative to full-cache evaluation. The improvement replicates on disjoint documents for two training seeds. Across four widths and 1.05--4.19B training tokens, the loss cost of weight tying is smallest at lower token budgets, suggesting an opportunity to use recurrent computation when data and model storage are limited.