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Related papers: Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences

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The quadratic computational and memory complexities of the Transformer's attention mechanism have limited its scalability for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we propose Luna, a linear unified nested attention mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Xuezhe Ma , Xiang Kong , Sinong Wang , Chunting Zhou , Jonathan May , Hao Ma , Luke Zettlemoyer

Although Transformer models such as Google's BERT and OpenAI's GPT-3 are successful in many natural language processing tasks, training and deploying these models are costly and inefficient.Even if pre-trained models are used, deploying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Madhusudan Verma

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Yifan Zhou , Zeqi Xiao , Tianyi Wei , Shuai Yang , Xingang Pan

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Qinglin Zhang , Siqi Zheng , Shiliang Zhang , Chong Deng , Hai Yu , Jiaqing Liu , Yukun Ma , Chong Zhang

The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Jesse Vig , Yonatan Belinkov

Since their introduction the Trasformer architectures emerged as the dominating architectures for both natural language processing and, more recently, computer vision applications. An intrinsic limitation of this family of "fully-attentive"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Carmelo Scribano , Giorgia Franchini , Marco Prato , Marko Bertogna

Mainstream Transformer-based large language models face major efficiency bottlenecks: training computation scales quadratically with sequence length, and inference memory grows linearly, limiting long-context processing. Building large…

Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mutian He , Philip N. Garner

In modern large language models (LLMs), increasing the context length is crucial for improving comprehension and coherence in long-context, multi-modal, and retrieval-augmented language generation. While many recent transformer models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Heejun Lee , Geon Park , Youngwan Lee , Jaduk Suh , Jina Kim , Wonyoung Jeong , Bumsik Kim , Hyemin Lee , Myeongjae Jeon , Sung Ju Hwang

To help address the growing demand for ever-longer sequence lengths in transformer models, Liu et al. recently proposed Ring Attention, an exact attention algorithm capable of overcoming per-device memory bottle- necks by distributing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 William Brandon , Aniruddha Nrusimha , Kevin Qian , Zachary Ankner , Tian Jin , Zhiye Song , Jonathan Ragan-Kelley

Various modifications of TRANSFORMER were recently used to solve time-series forecasting problem. We propose Query Selector - an efficient, deterministic algorithm for sparse attention matrix. Experiments show it achieves state-of-the art…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-18 Jacek Klimek , Jakub Klimek , Witold Kraskiewicz , Mateusz Topolewski

Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell , Mrinmaya Sachan

Attention mechanisms play a crucial role in the neural revolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP). With the growth of attention-based models, several pruning techniques have been developed to identify and exploit sparseness, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-20 Ileana Rugina , Rumen Dangovski , Li Jing , Preslav Nakov , Marin Soljačić

Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Jinbae Im , Sungzoon Cho

Self-attention is a key enabler of state-of-art accuracy for various transformer-based Natural Language Processing models. This attention mechanism calculates a correlation score for each word with respect to the other words in a sentence.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-18 Zheng Li , Soroush Ghodrati , Amir Yazdanbakhsh , Hadi Esmaeilzadeh , Mingu Kang

Non-hierarchical sparse attention Transformer-based models, such as Longformer and Big Bird, are popular approaches to working with long documents. There are clear benefits to these approaches compared to the original Transformer in terms…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Ilias Chalkidis , Xiang Dai , Manos Fergadiotis , Prodromos Malakasiotis , Desmond Elliott

This paper proposes Omnidirectional Representations from Transformers (OmniNet). In OmniNet, instead of maintaining a strictly horizontal receptive field, each token is allowed to attend to all tokens in the entire network. This process can…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Yi Tay , Mostafa Dehghani , Vamsi Aribandi , Jai Gupta , Philip Pham , Zhen Qin , Dara Bahri , Da-Cheng Juan , Donald Metzler

Transformer-based neural network architectures achieve state-of-the-art results in different domains, from natural language processing (NLP) to computer vision (CV). The key idea of Transformers, the attention mechanism, has already led to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alina Ermilova , Nikita Baramiia , Valerii Kornilov , Sergey Petrakov , Alexey Zaytsev

The quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms poses a critical bottleneck for large language models processing long contexts. While dynamic sparse attention methods offer input-adaptive efficiency, they face fundamental trade-offs:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Siran Liu , Guoxia Wang , Sa Wang , Jinle Zeng , HaoYang Xie , Siyu Lou , JiaBin Yang , DianHai Yu , Haifeng Wang , Chao Yang

Large Transformer models yield impressive results on many tasks, but are expensive to train, or even fine-tune, and so slow at decoding that their use and study becomes out of reach. We address this problem by leveraging sparsity. We study…