Related papers: Sparse Attention with Linear Units

Attention-based Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and shown strong performance in computer vision (CV) tasks. However, as the input sequence varies, the computational bottlenecks in Transformer models…

Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving…

Element-wise activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks via affecting the expressivity power and the learning dynamics. Learning-based activation functions have recently gained increasing attention and success. We…

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable…

Transformer-based deep models for single image super-resolution (SISR) have greatly improved the performance of lightweight SISR tasks in recent years. However, they often suffer from heavy computational burden and slow inference due to the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success with their billion-level parameters, yet they incur high inference overheads. The emergence of activation sparsity in LLMs provides a natural approach to reduce this cost by…

Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…

In this paper we investigate the performance of different types of rectified activation functions in convolutional neural network: standard rectified linear unit (ReLU), leaky rectified linear unit (Leaky ReLU), parametric rectified linear…

The quadratic computational cost of the self-attention mechanism is a primary challenge in scaling Transformer models. While attention sparsity is widely studied as a technique to improve computational efficiency, it is almost universally…

Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in a wide range of NLP tasks including summarization. Training and inference using large transformer models can be computationally expensive. Previous work has focused on one…

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…

This work explores optimizing transformer-based language models by integrating model compression techniques with inhibitor attention, a novel alternative attention mechanism. Inhibitor attention employs Manhattan distances and ReLU…

The computational cost of softmax-based attention in transformers limits their applicability to long-context tasks. Adaptive sparsity, of which $\alpha$-entmax attention is an example, offers a flexible data-dependent alternative, but…

Transformer models are computationally costly on long sequences since regular attention has quadratic $O(n^2)$ time complexity. We introduce Wavelet-Enhanced Random Spectral Attention (WERSA), a novel mechanism of linear $O(n)$ time…

Large Language Models (LLMs) incur quadratic attention complexity with input length, creating a major time bottleneck in the prefilling stage. Existing acceleration methods largely exploit attention score sparsity by estimating blocks with…

Textual noise, such as typos or abbreviations, is a well-known issue that penalizes vanilla Transformers for most downstream tasks. We show that this is also the case for sentence similarity, a fundamental task in multiple domains, e.g.…

We introduce sliced ReLU attention, a new attention mechanism that departs structurally from both softmax and its approximation alternatives. Instead of applying a nonlinearity to pairwise dot products, we operate on one-dimensional…

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

While sparse attention mitigates the computational bottleneck of long-context LLM training, its distributed training process exhibits extreme heterogeneity in both \textit{1)} sequence length and \textit{2)} sparsity sensitivity, leading to…

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…