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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Labovich, Asher, Bradley, Benjamin, Alexander, Vanessa, Harsha, Chaitanya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18807
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Table of Contents:
  • Encoder-decoder models offer substantial inference-time savings over decoder-only models, but their pretraining objectives suffer from sparse supervision and dynamic sequence lengths, keeping them out of practice at scale. We propose block-based double decoders, a novel transformer architecture that utilizes doubly-causal block-based attention masks to train with full loss supervision and static sequence packing, combining decoder-only training efficiency with encoder-decoder inference efficiency. In scaling law experiments, block-based double decoders strongly outperform encoder-decoders and closely track decoder-only models across scales. At inference time, they cut KV-cache memory and per-token compute by at least 2/3 without sacrificing prefill caching or other existing inference optimizations available to decoder-only models.