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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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Dongchen Han , Xuran Pan , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Attention plays a fundamental role in both natural and artificial intelligence systems. In deep learning, attention-based neural architectures, such as transformer architectures, are widely used to tackle problems in natural language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Pierre Baldi , Roman Vershynin

The inference demand for LLMs has skyrocketed in recent months, and serving models with low latencies remains challenging due to the quadratic input length complexity of the attention layers. In this work, we investigate the effect of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Georgy Tyukin , Gbetondji J-S Dovonon , Jean Kaddour , Pasquale Minervini

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

The Transformer architecture has become a cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence, but its core self-attention mechanism suffers from a complexity bottleneck that scales quadratically with sequence length, severely limiting its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zhongpan Tang

Transformer-based architectures achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech processing. However, their immense capacity often leads to overfitting, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig , Syeda Anshrah Gillani , Abdul Akbar Khan , Shahid Munir Shah , Muhammad Omer Khan

Attention layers apply a sequence-to-sequence mapping whose parameters depend on the pairwise interactions of the input elements. However, without any structural assumptions, memory and compute scale quadratically with the sequence length.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Evgenii Egorov , Hanno Ackermann , Markus Nagel , Hong Cai

As the demand for processing extended textual data grows, the ability to handle long-range dependencies and maintain computational efficiency is more critical than ever. One of the key issues for long-sequence modeling using attention-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Aosong Feng , Rex Ying , Leandros Tassiulas

Transformer layers, which use an alternating pattern of multi-head attention and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers, provide an effective tool for a variety of machine learning problems. As the transformer layers use residual connections…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yaofeng Desmond Zhong , Tongtao Zhang , Amit Chakraborty , Biswadip Dey

Mechanistic interpretability of transformers requires identifying not just which components matter but how they compose into the computational route that produced a prediction. Both attention and MLP follow a shared key-value template…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Po-Kai Chen , Niki van Stein , Aske Plaat

Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Zhuo Li , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Xiangtai Li , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

Trained attention layers exhibit striking and reproducible spectral structure of the weights, including low-rank collapse, bulk deformation, and isolated spectral outliers, yet the origin of these phenomena and their implications for…

State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Karim Ahmed , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher

One of the limitations of transformer networks is the sequence length due to the quadratic nature of the attention matrix. Classical self attention uses the entire sequence length, however, the actual attention being used is sparse. Humans…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Marc Estafanous

Pretrained embeddings based on the Transformer architecture have taken the NLP community by storm. We show that they can mathematically be reframed as a sum of vector factors and showcase how to use this reframing to study the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Timothee Mickus , Denis Paperno , Mathieu Constant

Transformer architectures are now central to sequence modeling tasks. At its heart is the attention mechanism, which enables effective modeling of long-term dependencies in a sequence. Recently, transformers have been successfully applied…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Huijie Pan , Lingpeng Kong

The general trend in NLP is towards increasing model capacity and performance via deeper neural networks. However, simply stacking more layers of the popular Transformer architecture for machine translation results in poor convergence and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xinhao Yao , Hongjin Qian , Xiaolin Hu , Gengze Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Yong Liu

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