From Collapse to Control: Understanding and Extending Context Length in Emerging Hybrid Models via Universal Position Interpolation

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission9337 Authors

Keywords: LLM, Hybrid Models, Mamba, Transformer, Long Context

Abstract: Hybrid Mamba-Transformer models have emerged as promising alternatives to pure Transformers, offering efficiency and competitive performance. However, they struggle to generalize beyond their training context windows, collapsing on long-context tasks. We provide the first systematic analysis of this failure, showing that it arises from uncontrolled state growth and uneven receptive field contributions across the hybrid architecture. Guided by this understanding, we introduce Universal Position Interpolation (UPI), a closed-form, training-free scaling method that unifies Mamba's cumulative decay with Transformer rotary frequency scaling. UPI selectively stabilizes unstable Mamba dynamics while rescaling Transformer encodings, controlling state growth and enabling reliable long-context generalization, with only a few auxiliary forward passes. Evaluation shows that UPI extends multiple state-of-the-art hybrid and pure Mamba models from 4K to up to 64K tokens on PG-19 perplexity, LongBench and RULER benchmarks, without sacrificing short-context accuracy. These findings establish the first principled bridge between Transformers and state-space models and open a new direction for training-free context extension methods for emerging hybrid models.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 9337