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Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

We introduce the $2$-simplicial Transformer, an extension of the Transformer which includes a form of higher-dimensional attention generalising the dot-product attention, and uses this attention to update entity representations with tensor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-15 James Clift , Dmitry Doryn , Daniel Murfet , James Wallbridge

Transformer training is notoriously difficult, requiring a careful design of optimizers and use of various heuristics. We make progress towards understanding the subtleties of training Transformers by carefully studying a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Minhak Song , Chulhee Yun , Ali Jadbabaie , Suvrit Sra

We introduce "talking-heads attention" - a variation on multi-head attention which includes linearprojections across the attention-heads dimension, immediately before and after the softmax operation.While inserting only a small number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Noam Shazeer , Zhenzhong Lan , Youlong Cheng , Nan Ding , Le Hou

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Armin Gerami , Monte Hoover , Pranav S. Dulepet , Ramani Duraiswami

Transformers have transformed the field of natural language processing. This performance is largely attributed to the use of stacked self-attention layers, each of which consists of matrix multiplies as well as softmax operations. As a…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Jacob R. Stevens , Rangharajan Venkatesan , Steve Dai , Brucek Khailany , Anand Raghunathan

While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yining Li , Dongchen Han , Zeyu Liu , Hanyi Wang , Yulin Wang , Gao Huang

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms. We begin with a theoretical framework that enables the identification of the model's selective ability and the geometric separation involved in token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Timur Mudarisov , Mikhail Burtsev , Tatiana Petrova , Radu State

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Naoki Nishikawa , Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Zhongjie Shi , Wenjing Liao

Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yuhong Chou , Man Yao , Kexin Wang , Yuqi Pan , Ruijie Zhu , Yiran Zhong , Yu Qiao , Jibin Wu , Bo Xu , Guoqi Li

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Jiachen Lu , Jinghan Yao , Junge Zhang , Xiatian Zhu , Hang Xu , Weiguo Gao , Chunjing Xu , Tao Xiang , Li Zhang

We propose the first method to show theoretical limitations for one-layer softmax transformers with arbitrarily many precision bits (even infinite). We establish those limitations for three tasks that require advanced reasoning. The first…

Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ido Andrew Atad , Itamar Zimerman , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chuanyang Zheng

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

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Large Transformer models routinely achieve state-of-the-art results on a number of tasks but training these models can be prohibitively costly, especially on long sequences. We introduce two techniques to improve the efficiency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Nikita Kitaev , Łukasz Kaiser , Anselm Levskaya