ICML2026
PRISM: Parallel Residual Iterative Sequence Model
Jie Jiang, Ke Cheng, XIN XU, Mengyang Pang, Xinzhe Xu, Jiaheng Li, Yue Liu, Yuan Wang, Jun Zhang, Huan Yu, Zhouchen Lin
Abstract
Generative sequence modeling faces a fundamental tension between the expressivity of Transformers and the efficiency of linear sequence models. Existing efficient architectures are theoretically bounded by shallow, single-step linear updates, while powerful iterative methods like Test-Time Training (TTT) break hardware parallelism due to two dimensions of serial dependency: token-level state reliance and step-level iteration loops. We propose PRISM (Parallel Residual Iterative Sequence Model) to resolve this tension. PRISM explicitly reconstructs the expressive gate × residual × direction iteration pattern of TTT in a parallelizable form. We employ a Write-Forget Decoupling strategy that isolates non-linearity within the injection operator. To bypass the serial dependency of explicit solvers, PRISM utilizes a two-stage proxy architecture: a short-convolution anchors the initial residual using local history energy, while a learned predictor estimates the refinement updates directly from the input. This design distills structural patterns associated with iterative correction into a parallelizable feedforward operator. Theoretically, we prove that this formulation achieves Rank- accumulation, structurally expanding the update manifold beyond the single-step Rank- bottleneck. Empirically, it achieves comparable performance to explicit optimization methods while achieving 174x higher throughput. Codes are available in https://github.com/gpr-prism/prism/.