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Related papers: Rethinking Attention with Performers

200 papers

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Linear attentions have shown potential for improving Transformer efficiency, reducing attention's quadratic complexity to linear in sequence length. This holds exciting promise for (1) training linear Transformers from scratch, (2)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Michael Zhang , Kush Bhatia , Hermann Kumbong , Christopher Ré

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

In this paper, we introduce \texttt{IAFormer}, a novel Transformer-based architecture that efficiently integrates pairwise particle interactions through a dynamic sparse attention mechanism. \texttt{IAFormer} has two new mechanisms within…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2026-04-21 W. Esmail , A. Hammad , M. Nojiri

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

Attention-based Transformers have demonstrated strong adaptability across a wide range of tasks and have become the backbone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their underlying mechanisms remain open for further exploration.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ruifeng Ren , Sheng Ouyang , Huayi Tang , Yong Liu

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

Transformers have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks, owing to their self-attention mechanism, but they are highly energy-consuming. Spiking Neural Networks have emerged as a promising energy-efficient…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Yufei Guo , Xiaode Liu , Yuanpei Chen , Weihang Peng , Yuhan Zhang , Zhe Ma

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Haixu Wu , Jialong Wu , Jiehui Xu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang

This research endeavors to offer insights into unlocking the further potential of transformer-based architectures. One of the primary motivations is to offer a geometric interpretation for the attention mechanism in transformers. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhongping Ji

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Qingru Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Sheng Zha , Tuo Zhao

Heavy computation is a bottleneck limiting deep-learningbased feature matching algorithms to be applied in many realtime applications. However, existing lightweight networks optimized for Euclidean data cannot address classical feature…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-13 Xiaoyong Lu , Yaping Yan , Bin Kang , Songlin Du

The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Firas Khader , Omar S. M. El Nahhas , Tianyu Han , Gustav Müller-Franzes , Sven Nebelung , Jakob Nikolas Kather , Daniel Truhn

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

The softmax function is crucial in Transformer attention, which normalizes each row of the attention scores with summation to one, achieving superior performances over other alternative functions. However, the softmax function can face a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chuanyang Zheng , Yihang Gao , Guoxuan Chen , Han Shi , Jing Xiong , Xiaozhe Ren , Chao Huang , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Yu Li

We study conditions under which transformers using soft attention can simulate hard attention, that is, effectively focus all attention on a subset of positions. First, we examine several subclasses of languages recognized by hard-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Andy Yang , Lena Strobl , David Chiang , Dana Angluin

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Transformers have outperformed recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in natural language generation. But this comes with a significant computational cost, as the attention mechanism's complexity scales quadratically with sequence length.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Jungo Kasai , Hao Peng , Yizhe Zhang , Dani Yogatama , Gabriel Ilharco , Nikolaos Pappas , Yi Mao , Weizhu Chen , Noah A. Smith