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Related papers: Softermax: Hardware/Software Co-Design of an Effic…

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Transformer-based architectures are the most used architectures in many deep learning fields like Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision or Speech processing. It may encourage the direct use of Transformers in the constrained tasks,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-29 Youness Dkhissi , Valentin Vielzeuf , Elys Allesiardo , Anthony Larcher

The softmax function is a fundamental component in deep learning. This study delves into the often-overlooked parameter within the softmax function, known as "temperature," providing novel insights into the practical and theoretical aspects…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hao Xuan , Bokai Yang , Xingyu Li

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

Softmax can become a computational bottleneck in the Transformer model's Multi-Head Attention (MHA) block, particularly in small models under low-precision inference, where exponentiation and normalization incur significant overhead. As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Dimitrios Danopoulos , Enrico Lupi , Michael Kagan , Maurizio Pierini

In recent years, large pre-trained Transformer-based language models have led to dramatic improvements in many natural language understanding tasks. To train these models with increasing sizes, many neural network practitioners attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Minjia Zhang , Niranjan Uma Naresh , Yuxiong He

This paper presents a framework in which hierarchical softmax is used to create a global hierarchical classifier. The approach is applicable for any classification task where there is a natural hierarchy among classes. We show empirical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-03 Jetze Schuurmans , Flavius Frasincar

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Gerard Sant , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Marta R. Costa-Jussà

Transformer-based architectures are the model of choice for natural language understanding, but they come at a significant cost, as they have quadratic complexity in the input length, require a lot of training data, and can be difficult to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Florian Mai , Arnaud Pannatier , Fabio Fehr , Haolin Chen , Francois Marelli , Francois Fleuret , James Henderson

Following up on the linear transformer part of the article from Katharopoulos et al., that takes this idea from Shen et al., the trick that produces a linear complexity for the attention mechanism is re-used and extended to a second-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Jean Mercat

While the transformer architecture has achieved state-of-the-art performance on natural language processing tasks, these models impose substantial memory and computational overhead. Recent research has identified significant architectural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Shivanshu Kumar , Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan

Low-resource language translation is a challenging but socially valuable NLP task. Building on recent work adapting the Transformer's normalization to this setting, we propose QKNorm, a normalization technique that modifies the attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-12 Alex Henry , Prudhvi Raj Dachapally , Shubham Pawar , Yuxuan Chen

The transformer is a neural network component that can be used to learn useful representations of sequences or sets of data-points. The transformer has driven recent advances in natural language processing, computer vision, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Richard E. Turner

Transformers have emerged as the dominant neural-network architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance in language processing and computer vision. At the core of these models lies the attention mechanism, which requires a nonlinear,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Luis Mickeler , Kai Lion , Alfonso Nardi , Jost Kellner , Pierre Didier , Bhavin J. Shastri , Niao He , Rachel Grange

Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

We introduce softpick, a rectified, not sum-to-one, drop-in replacement for softmax in transformer attention mechanisms that eliminates attention sink and massive activations. Our experiments with 340M and 1.8B parameter models demonstrate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Zayd M. K. Zuhri , Erland Hilman Fuadi , Alham Fikri Aji

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Mingcheng Lu , Yi-Chen Lee , Han Liu

Learning distributed representations, or embeddings, that encode the relational similarity patterns among objects is a relevant task in machine learning. A popular method to learn the embedding matrices $X, Y$ is optimizing a loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Lorenzo Dall'Amico , Enrico Maria Belliardo

Transformers have become a predominant machine learning workload, they are not only the de-facto standard for natural language processing tasks, but they are also being deployed in other domains such as vision and speech recognition. Many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Ibrahim Ahmed , Sahil Parmar , Matthew Boyd , Michael Beidler , Kris Kang , Bill Liu , Kyle Roach , John Kim , Dennis Abts

ASR systems are deployed across diverse environments, each with specific hardware constraints. We use supernet training to jointly train multiple encoders of varying sizes, enabling dynamic model size adjustment to fit hardware constraints…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Jingjing Xu , Eugen Beck , Zijian Yang , Ralf Schlüter

Recent advances in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their quadratic computational complexity concerning sequence length remains a significant bottleneck…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yefeng Zheng , Yingying Zhang , Derong Xu , Xuetao Wei , Tong Xu , Xiangyu Zhao