Sparse Token Routing in Efficient Transformers

Abstract

Efficient-transformer research often motivates token pruning and adaptive computation with the claim that not all tokens require equal computational effort. We test this claim end to end using SEWN, a two-stream Transformer that routes tokens through either lightweight or full-capacity processing using a learned gate. Across our experiments, routing introduces negligible accuracy change relative to parameter-matched baselines, while the gate's token-importance signal depends critically on how it is learned. A static lexicon-seeded prior fails a counterfactual faithfulness test on BoolQ, whereas a fully contextual gate achieves highly significant separation ($p<10^{-10}$) on both evaluated tasks without changing task accuracy.