Related papers: Higher Order Linear Transformer
Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…
The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…
Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the…
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)…
The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…
Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…
Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…
This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…
Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…
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…
The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…
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…
We prove that with linear transformations, both (i) two-layer self-attention and (ii) one-layer self-attention followed by a softmax function are universal approximators for continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on compact domains. Our…
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…
We provide a systematic recipe for translating ReLU approximation results to softmax attention mechanism. This recipe covers many common approximation targets. Importantly, it yields target-specific, economic resource bounds beyond…
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,…
While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…
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…
Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…
Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention…