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Recurrent Transformers Show Limited Gains in Multimodal Pretraining

A new research paper explores the effectiveness of recurrent depth in Transformers for data-limited pretraining, particularly in multimodal settings. The study found that while repeating layers (recurrent depth) improved performance on text-only tasks, it did not significantly mitigate the accuracy drop observed in multimodal training. This suggests that changes in language data and its presentation, rather than the lack of recurrent computation, are key factors in the performance gap between multimodal and text-only models. AI

IMPACT Suggests that improvements in multimodal model performance may lie in data handling rather than architectural changes.

RANK_REASON Research paper published on arXiv detailing experimental findings on Transformer architectures. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Recurrent Transformers Show Limited Gains in Multimodal Pretraining

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Research paper published on arXiv detailing experimental findings on Transformer architectures. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Daichi Hotta, Yohei Kobashi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo ·

    Loop Before You Leap: What Recurrent Depth Can and Cannot Buy in Data-Limited Pretraining

    arXiv:2611.06206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal models have often scored below text-only baselines in the BabyLM Challenge (Klerings et al., 2024; Takmaz et al., 2025). We test whether additional recurrent computation helps close this gap. Recurrence increases computat…