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Related papers: Sparse and Structured Visual Attention

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Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

We tackle the challenge of Visual Question Answering in multi-image setting for the ISVQA dataset. Traditional VQA tasks have focused on a single-image setting where the target answer is generated from a single image. Image set VQA,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Abhinav Khattar , Aviral Joshi , Har Simrat Singh , Pulkit Goel , Rohit Prakash Barnwal

Visual dialog is a task of answering a series of inter-dependent questions given an input image, and often requires to resolve visual references among the questions. This problem is different from visual question answering (VQA), which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-08-08 Paul Hongsuck Seo , Andreas Lehrmann , Bohyung Han , Leonid Sigal

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

The transformer architecture has driven breakthroughs in recent years on tasks which require modeling pairwise relationships between sequential elements, as is the case in natural language understanding. However, long seqeuences pose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Heejun Lee , Jina Kim , Jeffrey Willette , Sung Ju Hwang

Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task that has received increasing attention from both the computer vision and the natural language processing communities. Given an image and a question in natural language, it requires…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2016-07-21 Qi Wu , Damien Teney , Peng Wang , Chunhua Shen , Anthony Dick , Anton van den Hengel

We propose a novel attention model that can accurately attends to target objects of various scales and shapes in images. The model is trained to gradually suppress irrelevant regions in an input image via a progressive attentive process…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-08-08 Paul Hongsuck Seo , Zhe Lin , Scott Cohen , Xiaohui Shen , Bohyung Han

Visual Commonsense Reasoning (VCR) remains a significant yet challenging research problem in the realm of visual reasoning. A VCR model generally aims at answering a textual question regarding an image, followed by the rationale prediction…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Zhenyang Li , Yangyang Guo , Kejie Wang , Fan Liu , Liqiang Nie , Mohan Kankanhalli

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhenyi Shen , Junru Lu , Lin Gui , Jiazheng Li , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

Transformer architectures are now central to sequence modeling tasks. At its heart is the attention mechanism, which enables effective modeling of long-term dependencies in a sequence. Recently, transformers have been successfully applied…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Huijie Pan , Lingpeng Kong

We introduce a new attention mechanism, dubbed structural self-attention (StructSA), that leverages rich correlation patterns naturally emerging in key-query interactions of attention. StructSA generates attention maps by recognizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-08 Manjin Kim , Paul Hongsuck Seo , Cordelia Schmid , Minsu Cho

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has driven significant progress in Visual Question Answering (VQA), evolving from Single to Multi Image VQA (MVQA). However, the increased number of images in MVQA inevitably…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Kang Zeng , Guojin Zhong , Jintao Cheng , Jin Yuan , Zhiyong Li

Text-based VQA aims at answering questions by reading the text present in the images. It requires a large amount of scene-text relationship understanding compared to the VQA task. Recent studies have shown that the question-answer pairs in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Shamanthak Hegde , Soumya Jahagirdar , Shankar Gangisetty

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Softmax attention struggles with long contexts due to structural limitations: the strict sum-to-one constraint forces attention sinks on irrelevant tokens, and probability mass disperses as sequence lengths increase. We tackle these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Xingyue Huang , Xueying Ding , Mingxuan Ju , Yozen Liu , Neil Shah , Tong Zhao

Visual question answering as recently proposed multimodal learning task has enjoyed wide attention from the deep learning community. Lately, the focus was on developing new representation fusion methods and attention mechanisms to achieve…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-08-03 Ilija Ilievski , Jiashi Feng

In visual question answering (VQA), a machine must answer a question given an associated image. Recently, accessibility researchers have explored whether VQA can be deployed in a real-world setting where users with visual impairments learn…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Yang Trista Cao , Kyle Seelman , Kyungjun Lee , Hal Daumé

Learning to answer visual questions is a challenging task since the multi-modal inputs are within two feature spaces. Moreover, reasoning in visual question answering requires the model to understand both image and question, and align them…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Peixi Xiong , Yilin Shen , Hongxia Jin

Self-attention mechanisms, especially multi-head self-attention (MSA), have achieved great success in many fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, many existing vision transformer (ViT) works simply inherent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-17 Leijie Wu , Song Guo , Yaohong Ding , Junxiao Wang , Wenchao Xu , Richard Yida Xu , Jie Zhang

Self-attention scales quadratically with input size, limiting its use for large-scale physical systems. Although sparse attention mechanisms provide a viable alternative, they are primarily designed for regular structures such as text or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Catalin E. Brita , Hieu Nguyen , Lohithsai Yadala Chanchu , Domonkos Nagy , Maksim Zhdanov