Attention Bridge Method Distills Transformers into Mamba Models with Less Data
A new arXiv paper proposes an "attention bridge" technique for converting pretrained Transformer models into Mamba-style state-space models. The approach aims to make the distillation process more data efficient, addressing the high compute cost of training competitive SSMs from scratch. The work targets the gap between the mature Transformer ecosystem and the less developed tooling around state-space architectures.