Knocking-Heads Attention
Authors: name: Zhanchao Zhou; name: Xiaodong Chen; name: Haoxing Chen; name: Zhenzhong Lan; name: Jianguo Li
Published: 2025-10-27 06:28:58

Abstract: Multi-head attention (MHA) has become the cornerstone of modern large
language models, enhancing representational capacity through parallel attention
heads. However, increasing the number of heads inherently weakens individual
head capacity, and existing attention mechanisms - whether standard MHA or its
variants like grouped-query attention (GQA) and grouped-tied attention (GTA) -
simply concatenate outputs from isolated heads without strong interaction. To
address this limitation, we propose knocking-heads attention (KHA), which
enables attention heads to "knock" on each other - facilitating cross-head
feature-level interactions before the scaled dot-product attention. This is
achieved by applying a shared, diagonally-initialized projection matrix across
all heads. The diagonal initialization preserves head-specific specialization
at the start of training while allowing the model to progressively learn
integrated cross-head representations. KHA adds only minimal parameters and
FLOPs and can be seamlessly integrated into MHA, GQA, GTA, and other attention
variants. We validate KHA by training a 6.1B parameter MoE model (1.01B
activated) on 1T high-quality tokens. Compared to baseline attention
mechanisms, KHA brings superior and more stable training dynamics, achieving
better performance across downstream tasks.