English

CAT: Circular-Convolutional Attention for Sub-Quadratic Transformers

Machine Learning 2026-01-06 v2 Computation and Language Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Abstract

Transformers have driven remarkable breakthroughs in natural language processing and computer vision, yet their standard attention mechanism still imposes O(N^2) complexity, hindering scalability to longer sequences. We introduce Circular-convolutional ATtention (CAT), a Fourier-based approach that efficiently applies circular convolutions to reduce complexity without sacrificing representational power. CAT achieves O(NlogN) computations, requires fewer learnable parameters by streamlining fully connected layers, and introduces no additional heavy operations, resulting in consistent accuracy improvements and about a 10% speedup in naive PyTorch implementations. Based on the Engineering-Isomorphic Transformers (EITs) framework, CAT's design not only offers practical efficiency and ease of implementation, but also provides insights to guide the development of future high-performance Transformer architectures. Finally, our ablation studies highlight the key conditions underlying CAT's success, shedding light on broader principles for scalable attention mechanisms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.06704,
  title  = {CAT: Circular-Convolutional Attention for Sub-Quadratic Transformers},
  author = {Yoshihiro Yamada},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.06704},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Accepted as a poster at NeurIPS 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:52:03.504Z