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Related papers: Rethinking Attention with Performers

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Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 O. Duranthon , P. Marion , C. Boyer , B. Loureiro , L. Zdeborová

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

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

Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Nirmal Patel , Nilesh Gupta , Inderjit S. Dhillon

The recent boom of linear forecasting models questions the ongoing passion for architectural modifications of Transformer-based forecasters. These forecasters leverage Transformers to model the global dependencies over temporal tokens of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-15 Yong Liu , Tengge Hu , Haoran Zhang , Haixu Wu , Shiyu Wang , Lintao Ma , Mingsheng Long

Transformers are among the state of the art for many tasks in speech, vision, and natural language processing, among others. Self-attentions, which are crucial contributors to this performance have quadratic computational complexity, which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Roshan Sharma , Bhiksha Raj

Learning feature interaction is the critical backbone to building recommender systems. In web-scale applications, learning feature interaction is extremely challenging due to the sparse and large input feature space; meanwhile, manually…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Huan Gui , Ruoxi Wang , Ke Yin , Long Jin , Maciej Kula , Taibai Xu , Lichan Hong , Ed H. Chi

Transformers have achieved significant success across various domains, relying on self-attention to capture dependencies. However, the standard first-order attention mechanism is often limited by a low-rank bottleneck, struggling to capture…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hanting Chen , Chong Zhu , Kai Han , Yuchuan Tian , Yuchen Liang , Tianyu Guo , Xinghao Chen , Dacheng Tao , Yunhe Wang

Transformer models have revolutionized natural language processing, achieving state-of-the-art performance and demonstrating remarkable scalability. However, their memory demands, particularly due to maintaining full context in memory, pose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Juan Gabriel Kostelec , Qinghai Guo

We revisit the design choices in Transformers, and propose methods to address their weaknesses in handling long sequences. First, we propose a simple layer named gated attention unit, which allows the use of a weaker single-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Weizhe Hua , Zihang Dai , Hanxiao Liu , Quoc V. Le

Accurate weather forecasting is crucial in various sectors, impacting decision-making processes and societal events. Data-driven approaches based on machine learning models have recently emerged as a promising alternative to numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Zijie Li , Anthony Zhou , Saurabh Patil , Amir Barati Farimani

Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Yang Li , Liangzhen Lai , Yuan Shangguan , Forrest N. Iandola , Zhaoheng Ni , Ernie Chang , Yangyang Shi , Vikas Chandra

Transformers have demonstrated their effectiveness in image restoration tasks. Existing Transformer architectures typically comprise two essential components: multi-head self-attention and feed-forward network (FFN). The former captures…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Cong Wang , Jinshan Pan , Yeying Jin , Liyan Wang , Wei Wang , Gang Fu , Wenqi Ren , Xiaochun Cao

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

Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. However, all approximations thus far have ignored the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang

The quadratic complexity of dot-product attention introduced in Transformer remains a fundamental bottleneck impeding the progress of foundation models toward unbounded context lengths. Addressing this challenge, we introduce the Deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yifan Zhang

Transformer-based models have gained large popularity and demonstrated promising results in long-term time-series forecasting in recent years. In addition to learning attention in time domain, recent works also explore learning attention in…

The Transformer-based model have made significant strides in semantic matching tasks by capturing connections between phrase pairs. However, to assess the relevance of sentence pairs, it is insufficient to just examine the general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Bo Li , Di Liang , Zixin Zhang

Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai