Papers › Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models

Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models

21 Feb 2023arXiv:2302.10866archive 2025-07-28

Michael Poli, Stefano Massaroli, Eric Nguyen, Daniel Y. Fu, Tri Dao, Stephen Baccus, Yoshua Bengio, Stefano Ermon, Christopher Ré

Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subquadratic methods based on low-rank and sparse approximations need to be combined with dense attention layers to match Transformers, indicating a gap in capability. In this work, we propose Hyena, a subquadratic drop-in replacement for attention constructed by interleaving implicitly parametrized long convolutions and data-controlled gating. In recall and reasoning tasks on sequences of thousands to hundreds of thousands of tokens, Hyena improves accuracy by more than 50 points over operators relying on state-spaces and other implicit and explicit methods, matching attention-based models. We set a new state-of-the-art for dense-attention-free architectures on language modeling in standard datasets (WikiText103 and The Pile), reaching Transformer quality with a 20% reduction in training compute required at sequence length 2K. Hyena operators are twice as fast as highly optimized attention at sequence length 8K, and 100x faster at sequence length 64K.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2302.10866")

Code

Syntology Ran 5 of 5 code samples harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 4 ran · our draft was wrong; 1 ran · fixture could not drive it.

By repository: official repository: 1 sample from 1 repository, 1 ran; community (archive-listed): 3 samples from 1 repository, 3 ran; 1 identical to code first harvested elsewhere. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

hazyresearch/safari officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report
Suro-One/Hyena-Hierarchy mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
i404788/s5-pytorch mentioned on GitHubjaxMPL-2.0 report
lindermanlab/S5 mentioned on GitHubjaxMIT report
togethercomputer/stripedhyena mentioned on GitHubpytorchApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

5 samples harvested; 5 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

4ran · our draft was wrong
1ran · fixture could not drive it

Licence: 4 of the 5 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. Some samples are identical code Syntology first harvested from another repository; for those, this paper's copy is not located and its licence is not recorded. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

fftconv_ref hazyresearch/safari/src/models/sequence/hyena.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 6736debb6f8316b9 · report
build_vocab Suro-One/Hyena-Hierarchy/hyena-split-memory.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted no licence file found · pointer only · d3511a9b66800bd1 · report
expand_model_vocab Suro-One/Hyena-Hierarchy/hyena-split-memory.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · c75ab6c159dc8368 · report
merge_vocab Suro-One/Hyena-Hierarchy/hyena-split-memory.py community (archive-listed) ran · our draft was wrong no licence file found · pointer only · d3fbe2e426af0f8c · report
mul_sum identical code first harvested elsewhere ran · fixture could not drive it licence of this copy not recorded · 5dd28d20c60f0c19 · report

Tasks

2kLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingQuestion Answering

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Language Modelling WikiText-103 Hyena-3-slim Test perplexity 18.5 #37 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Language Modelling WikiText-103 Hyena-3 Test perplexity 18.6 #39 of 89 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering BoolQ Hyena Accuracy 51.8 #64 of 65 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections