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Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across multiple NLP tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism complexity scales quadratically with the sequence length, creating an obstacle for tasks involving long sequences, like in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Belen Alastruey , Javier Ferrando , Gerard I. Gállego , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Transformer models achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. They however suffer from a prohibitive limitation due to the self-attention mechanism, inducing $O(n^2)$ complexity with regard to sequence length. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Charles Condevaux , Sébastien Harispe

Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Suyu Ge , Liliang Ren , Barun Patra , Vishrav Chaudhary , Hao Peng , Xia Song

Transformers have become the dominant architecture across a wide range of domains, largely due to the effectiveness of multi-head attention in capturing diverse representation subspaces. However, standard multi-head attention activates all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Bilal Faye , Abdoulaye Mbaye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Self-attention, an architectural motif designed to model long-range interactions in sequential data, has driven numerous recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and beyond. This work provides a theoretical analysis of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Benjamin L. Edelman , Surbhi Goel , Sham Kakade , Cyril Zhang

The self-attention mechanism has significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, facilitating the development of advanced language-learning machines. Although its utility is widely acknowledged, the precise mechanisms of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Tal Halevi , Yarden Tzach , Ronit D. Gross , Shalom Rosner , Ido Kanter

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks. However, their `large' scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Chaoran Zhang , Lixin Zou , Dan Luo , Min Tang , Xiangyang Luo , Zihao Li , Chenliang Li

Transformers are widely used across various applications, many of which yield sparse or partially filled attention matrices. Examples include attention masks designed to reduce the quadratic complexity of attention, sequence packing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Agniv Sharma , Jonas Geiping

Recent neural networks (NNs) with self-attention exhibit competitiveness across different AI domains, but the essential attention mechanism brings massive computation and memory demands. To this end, various sparsity patterns are introduced…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Haibin Wu , Wenming Li , Kai Yan , Zhihua Fan , Peiyang Wu , Yuqun Liu , Yanhuan Liu , Ziqing Qiang , Meng Wu , Kunming Liu , Xiaochun Ye , Dongrui Fan

Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose $O(N^2)$ complexity with respect to sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xinghao Wang , Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Chenkun Tan , Shaojun Zhou , Zhaoxiang Liu , Shiguo Lian , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xipeng Qiu

Sparse Transformer has recently attracted a lot of attention since the ability for reducing the quadratic dependency on the sequence length. We argue that two factors, information bottleneck sensitivity and inconsistency between different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Yang Liu , Jiaxiang Liu , Li Chen , Yuxiang Lu , Shikun Feng , Zhida Feng , Yu Sun , Hao Tian , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang

Transformers are powerful sequence models, but require time and memory that grows quadratically with the sequence length. In this paper we introduce sparse factorizations of the attention matrix which reduce this to $O(n \sqrt{n})$. We also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-25 Rewon Child , Scott Gray , Alec Radford , Ilya Sutskever

Initially developed for natural language processing (NLP), Transformer model is now widely used for speech processing tasks such as speaker recognition, due to its powerful sequence modeling capabilities. However, conventional…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-01-28 Rui Wang , Junyi Ao , Long Zhou , Shujie Liu , Zhihua Wei , Tom Ko , Qing Li , Yu Zhang

Sparsifying the Transformer has garnered considerable interest, as training the Transformer is very computationally demanding. Prior efforts to sparsify the Transformer have either used a fixed pattern or data-driven approach to reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-25 Bokyeong Yoon , Yoonsang Han , Gordon Euhyun Moon

Recently, the Transformer model that is based solely on attention mechanisms, has advanced the state-of-the-art on various machine translation tasks. However, recent studies reveal that the lack of recurrence hinders its further improvement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Jie Hao , Xing Wang , Baosong Yang , Longyue Wang , Jinfeng Zhang , Zhaopeng Tu

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

Spiking Neural Networks have attracted significant attention in recent years due to their distinctive low-power characteristics. Meanwhile, Transformer models, known for their powerful self-attention mechanisms and parallel processing…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Hangming Zhang , Alexander Sboev , Roman Rybka , Qiang Yu

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chen Zhu , Wei Ping , Chaowei Xiao , Mohammad Shoeybi , Tom Goldstein , Anima Anandkumar , Bryan Catanzaro

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

Transformer-based models are not efficient in processing long sequences due to the quadratic space and time complexity of the self-attention modules. To address this limitation, Linformer and Informer are proposed to reduce the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Yifan Chen , Qi Zeng , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Di Jin , Heng Ji , Yun Yang