English
Related papers

Related papers: Predicting Attention Sparsity in Transformers

200 papers

We propose Sparse Sinkhorn Attention, a new efficient and sparse method for learning to attend. Our method is based on differentiable sorting of internal representations. Concretely, we introduce a meta sorting network that learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Yi Tay , Dara Bahri , Liu Yang , Donald Metzler , Da-Cheng Juan

Temporal causal analysis means understanding the underlying causes behind observed variables over time. Deep learning based methods such as transformers are increasingly used to capture temporal dynamics and causal relationships beyond mere…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Riya Mahesh , Rahul Vashisht , Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan

This paper investigates automatic piano transcription based on computationally-efficient yet high-performant variants of the Transformer that can capture longer-term dependency over the whole musical piece. Recently, transformer-based…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Weixing Wei , Kazuyoshi Yoshii

Modern neural networks are often augmented with an attention mechanism, which tells the network where to focus within the input. We propose in this paper a new framework for sparse and structured attention, building upon a smoothed max…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-26 Vlad Niculae , Mathieu Blondel

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown their competitive advantages performance-wise compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) though they often come with high computational costs. To this end, previous methods explore different…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Cong Wei , Brendan Duke , Ruowei Jiang , Parham Aarabi , Graham W. Taylor , Florian Shkurti

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Hao Peng , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith , Lingpeng Kong

Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Dan Peng , Zhihui Fu , Zewen Ye , Zhuoran Song , Jun Wang

Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Dongsheng Wang , Jinsen Zhang , Dawei Su , Hui Huang

Efficient Transformers have been developed for long sequence modeling, due to their subquadratic memory and time complexity. Sparse Transformer is a popular approach to improving the efficiency of Transformers by restricting self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Aosong Feng , Irene Li , Yuang Jiang , Rex Ying

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Hongwu Peng , Shaoyi Huang , Shiyang Chen , Bingbing Li , Tong Geng , Ang Li , Weiwen Jiang , Wujie Wen , Jinbo Bi , Hang Liu , Caiwen Ding

Large Transformer models yield impressive results on many tasks, but are expensive to train, or even fine-tune, and so slow at decoding that their use and study becomes out of reach. We address this problem by leveraging sparsity. We study…

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Transformer architecture has been very successful long runner in the field of Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLM) because of its powerful attention-based learning and parallel-natured architecture. As the models grow gigantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Phani Kumar , Nyshadham , Jyothendra Varma , Polisetty V R K , Aditya Rathore

Large language models (LLMs) encounter computational challenges during long-sequence inference, especially in the attention pre-filling phase, where the complexity grows quadratically with the prompt length. Previous efforts to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Xunhao Lai , Jianqiao Lu , Yao Luo , Yiyuan Ma , Xun Zhou

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Qirui Li , Guangcong Zheng , Qi Zhao , Jie Li , Bin Dong , Yiwu Yao , Xi Li

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Qingru Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Sheng Zha , Tuo Zhao

Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is $\alpha$-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Nuno Gonçalves , Hugo Pitorro , Vlad Niculae , Edoardo Ponti , Lei Li , Andre Martins , Marcos Treviso

We introduce Performers, Transformer architectures which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on…

Graph Transformers excel in long-range dependency modeling, but generally require quadratic memory complexity in the number of nodes in an input graph, and hence have trouble scaling to large graphs. Sparse attention variants such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Balaji Venkatachalam , Ameya Velingker , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland