English
Related papers

Related papers: Normalized Attention Without Probability Cage

200 papers

With the advent of large models based on the Transformer architecture, researchers have observed an anomalous phenomenon in the Attention mechanism--there is a very high attention on the first element, which is prevalent across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Ruiqing Yan , Xingbo Du , Haoyu Deng , Linghan Zheng , Qiuzhuang Sun , Jifang Hu , Yuhang Shao , Penghao Jiang , Jinrong Jiang , Lian Zhao

Transformers' quadratic computational complexity limits their scalability despite remarkable performance. While linear attention reduces this to linear complexity, pre-training such models from scratch remains, in most cases, prohibitively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Martin Benfeghoul , Teresa Delgado , Adnan Oomerjee , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang , Zafeirios Fountas

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan

Transformer architectures have led to remarkable progress in many state-of-art applications. However, despite their successes, modern transformers rely on the self-attention mechanism, whose time- and space-complexity is quadratic in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Feyza Duman Keles , Pruthuvi Mahesakya Wijewardena , Chinmay Hegde

Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Liangqiong Qu , Yuyin Zhou , Paul Pu Liang , Yingda Xia , Feifei Wang , Ehsan Adeli , Li Fei-Fei , Daniel Rubin

Softmax Self-Attention (SSA) is a key component of Transformer architectures. However, when utilised within skipless architectures, which aim to improve representation learning, recent work has highlighted the inherent instability of SSA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Leo Zhang , James Martens

Modern neural networks are often augmented with an attention mechanism, which tells the network where to focus within the input. We propose in this paper a new framework for sparse and structured attention, building upon a smoothed max…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-26 Vlad Niculae , Mathieu Blondel

Transformers are state-of-the-art in a wide range of NLP tasks and have also been applied to many real-world products. Understanding the reliability and certainty of transformer model predictions is crucial for building trustable machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Jiahuan Pei , Cheng Wang , György Szarvas

Transformer-based architectures achieved breakthrough performance in natural language processing and computer vision, yet they remain inferior to simpler linear baselines in multivariate long-term forecasting. To better understand this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Romain Ilbert , Ambroise Odonnat , Vasilii Feofanov , Aladin Virmaux , Giuseppe Paolo , Themis Palpanas , Ievgen Redko

Attention is a cornerstone of human cognition that facilitates the efficient extraction of information in everyday life. Recent developments in artificial intelligence like the Transformer architecture also incorporate the idea of attention…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2024-07-03 Minglu Zhao , Dehong Xu , Tao Gao

Low-resource language translation is a challenging but socially valuable NLP task. Building on recent work adapting the Transformer's normalization to this setting, we propose QKNorm, a normalization technique that modifies the attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Alex Henry , Prudhvi Raj Dachapally , Shubham Pawar , Yuxuan Chen

Vision Transformers has demonstrated competitive performance on computer vision tasks benefiting from their ability to capture long-range dependencies with multi-head self-attention modules and multi-layer perceptron. However, calculating…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Xiangyu Chen , Qinghao Hu , Kaidong Li , Cuncong Zhong , Guanghui Wang

Recently, the Transformer machine translation system has shown strong results by stacking attention layers on both the source and target-language sides. But the inference of this model is slow due to the heavy use of dot-product attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Tong Xiao , Yinqiao Li , Jingbo Zhu , Zhengtao Yu , Tongran Liu

Standard transformer architectures apply a single attention mechanism uniformly across all tokens and sequence positions, irrespective of local context or computational budget. We propose Meta-Attention, a framework that dynamically routes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Alan Ferrari

Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Sinong Wang , Belinda Z. Li , Madian Khabsa , Han Fang , Hao Ma

Despite their power, Transformers face challenges with long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. To address this limitation, methods like $k$-Nearest-Neighbor ($k$NN) attention have been introduced [Roy, Saffar,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Themistoklis Haris

The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Giorgio Roffo , Hazem Abdelkawy , Nilli Lavie , Luke Palmer

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chuanyang Zheng

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Venmugil Elango

Attention mechanisms have been extensively employed in various applications, including time series modeling, owing to their capacity to capture intricate dependencies; however, their utility is often constrained by quadratic computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Mingtao Zhang , Guoli Yang , Zhanxing Zhu , Mengzhu Wang , Xiaoying Bai