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The Transformer architecture consists of self-attention and feed-forward networks (FFNs) which can be viewed as key-value memories according to previous works. However, FFN and traditional memory utilize different activation functions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Kai Shen , Junliang Guo , Xu Tan , Siliang Tang , Rui Wang , Jiang Bian

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning and generative modeling to enable unprecedented advancements in natural language processing tasks and beyond. However, designing hardware accelerators for executing transformer models is…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Pratyush Dhingra , Janardhan Rao Doppa , Partha Pratim Pande

Every person speaks or writes their own flavor of their native language, influenced by a number of factors: the content they tend to talk about, their gender, their social status, or their geographical origin. When attempting to perform…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-07 Paul Michel , Graham Neubig

When implementations of the Transformer's self-attention layer utilize SRAM instead of DRAM, they can achieve significant speedups. The Tenstorrent Grayskull architecture provides a large SRAM, distributed across a grid of cores. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-22 Moritz Thüning

Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Yichuan Deng , Zhihang Li , Zhao Song

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

Since the introduction of the Transformer architecture for large language models, the softmax-based attention layer has faced increasing scrutinity due to its quadratic-time computational complexity. Attempts have been made to replace it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Robert Forchheimer

Despite great popularity of applying softmax to map the non-normalised outputs of a neural network to a probability distribution over predicting classes, this normalised exponential transformation still seems to be artificial. A theoretic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Zhenyue Qin , Dongwoo Kim

Normalization methods improve both optimization and generalization of ConvNets. To further boost performance, the recently-proposed switchable normalization (SN) provides a new perspective for deep learning: it learns to select different…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Wenqi Shao , Tianjian Meng , Jingyu Li , Ruimao Zhang , Yudian Li , Xiaogang Wang , Ping Luo

Certified verification of transformer attention requires bounding the softmax function over interval constraints on the pre-softmax scores. Existing verifiers relax softmax ndependently of the downstream objective, leaving avoidable slack.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Navid Rezazadeh , Arash Gholami Davoodi

The transformer's attention mechanism has revolutionized AI and machine learning, with its efficient computation being crucial to its performance. However, calculating attention involves matrix operations interspersed with softmax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Kosmas Alexandridis , Vasileios Titopoulos , Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

Increasing the size of a Transformer does not always lead to enhanced performance. This phenomenon cannot be explained by the empirical scaling laws. Furthermore, the model's enhanced performance is closely associated with its memorization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Xueyan Niu , Bo Bai , Lei Deng , Wei Han

Neural machine translation (NMT) models are typically trained using a softmax cross-entropy loss where the softmax distribution is compared against smoothed gold labels. In low-resource scenarios, NMT models tend to over-fit because the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-22 Raj Dabre , Atsushi Fujita

We introduce adaptive input representations for neural language modeling which extend the adaptive softmax of Grave et al. (2017) to input representations of variable capacity. There are several choices on how to factorize the input and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Alexei Baevski , Michael Auli

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

Transformers have become the backbone of neural network architecture for most machine learning applications. Their widespread use has resulted in multiple efforts on accelerating attention, the basic building block of transformers. This…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Dong Eun Kim , Tanvi Sharma , Kaushik Roy

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

With the rapid development of AI technology in recent years, there have been many studies with deep learning models in soft sensing area. However, the models have become more complex, yet, the data sets remain limited: researchers are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Chao Zhang , Jaswanth Yella , Yu Huang , Xiaoye Qian , Sergei Petrov , Andrey Rzhetsky , Sthitie Bom