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Related papers: Sparse and Continuous Attention Mechanisms

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The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Attention-based models are successful when trained on large amounts of data. In this paper, we demonstrate that even in the low-resource scenario, attention can be learned effectively. To this end, we start with discrete human-annotated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-29 Yujia Bao , Shiyu Chang , Mo Yu , Regina Barzilay

We address the problem of learning of continuous exponential family distributions with unbounded support. While a lot of progress has been made on learning of Gaussian graphical models, we still lack scalable algorithms for reconstructing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Christopher X. Ren , Sidhant Misra , Marc Vuffray , Andrey Y. Lokhov

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

Attention mechanisms have revolutionized several domains of artificial intelligence, such as natural language processing and computer vision, by enabling models to selectively focus on relevant parts of the input data. While recent work has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Addison Kristanto Julistiono , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Navid Azizan

Attention modules, as simple and effective tools, have not only enabled deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art results in many domains, but also enhanced their interpretability. Most current models use deterministic attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-22 Xinjie Fan , Shujian Zhang , Bo Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Exponential family distributions are highly useful in machine learning since their calculation can be performed efficiently through natural parameters. The exponential family has recently been extended to the t-exponential family, which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-30 Futoshi Futami , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

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 study a generalization of classical active learning to real-world settings with concrete prediction targets where sampling is restricted to an accessible region of the domain, while prediction targets may lie outside this region. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jonas Hübotter , Bhavya Sukhija , Lenart Treven , Yarden As , Andreas Krause

Statistical inference may follow a frequentist approach or it may follow a Bayesian approach or it may use the minimum description length principle (MDL). Our goal is to identify situations in which these different approaches to statistical…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Peter Harremoës

Variational inference is becoming more and more popular for approximating intractable posterior distributions in Bayesian statistics and machine learning. Meanwhile, a few recent works have provided theoretical justification and new…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Badr-Eddine Chérief-Abdellatif

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) enable globally coherent, bidirectional, and controllable text generation, offering advantages over traditional autoregressive LLMs, while scaling to ultra-long sequences remains costly. Many existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wenhu Zhang , Yiming Wu , Huanyu Wang , Yaoyang Liu , Huanzhang Dou , Senqiao Yang , Sitong Wu , Hanbin Zhao , Jiaya Jia

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

Sparse models are desirable for many applications across diverse domains as they can perform automatic variable selection, aid interpretability, and provide regularization. When fitting sparse models in a Bayesian framework, however,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2020-10-15 Jeffrey P. Spence

We propose a novel, efficient approach for distributed sparse learning in high-dimensions, where observations are randomly partitioned across machines. Computationally, at each round our method only requires the master machine to solve a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-05-26 Jialei Wang , Mladen Kolar , Nathan Srebro , Tong Zhang

Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is $\alpha$-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Nuno Gonçalves , Hugo Pitorro , Vlad Niculae , Edoardo Ponti , Lei Li , Andre Martins , Marcos Treviso

Diffusion processes are a class of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) providing a rich family of expressive models that arise naturally in dynamic modelling tasks. Probabilistic inference and learning under generative models with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Prakhar Verma , Vincent Adam , Arno Solin

Visual attention mechanisms are a key component of neural network models for computer vision. By focusing on a discrete set of objects or image regions, these mechanisms identify the most relevant features and use them to build more…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-08 António Farinhas , André F. T. Martins , Pedro M. Q. Aguiar

Part I of this work [2] developed the exact diffusion algorithm to remove the bias that is characteristic of distributed solutions for deterministic optimization problems. The algorithm was shown to be applicable to a larger set of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-12-27 Kun Yuan , Bicheng Ying , Xiaochuan Zhao , Ali H. Sayed