Depth-Staggered Fibonacci Spacing for Sparse Attention: Static Schedules Beat Learned Dilation and Extrapolate Where Dense Attention Fails

arXiv:2606.28560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study sparse self-attention in which each query attends to a dense local window plus a set of Fibonacci-spaced offsets, with a per-layer scalar alpha that compresses or expands the spacing. Across 21 language models trained under one matched recipe (60M parameters, 512 hidden, 16 layers, 426M tokens), we compare four ways of setting alpha across depth: fixed, per-layer learned, a static linear stagger, and a coprime (anti-gridding) reassignment ...