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Architectures

Hybrid Architecture

A model that mixes complementary building blocks, such as attention and state space layers.

Definition

A hybrid architecture combines complementary components to capture the benefits of each. A common example interleaves Transformer attention layers with state space model layers like Mamba: attention provides global context at higher cost, while the state space layers handle long-range dependencies efficiently. Hybrids may also mix sparse mixture-of-experts feedforward layers with dense attention. The approach is an active research direction aimed at exceeding pure-Transformer efficiency.