Morning Edition · Wednesday, July 22, 2026Published at 1:47 AM EDT · New York

Researchers Ask Whether Lightweight Convolutions Belong Back Inside Large Language Models

A new paper adds depthwise convolutions to Transformers to encode the locality of language that self-attention leaves implicit.

A paper titled Convolution for Large Language Models revisits an architectural question most of the field considered settled. Self-attention gives Transformers global token interaction but does not explicitly encode the locality of natural…