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Related papers: Predicting Attention Sparsity in Transformers

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The sparse transformer can reduce the computational complexity of the self-attention layers to $O(n)$, whilst still being a universal approximator of continuous sequence-to-sequence functions. However, this permutation variant operation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Shidi Li , Christian Walder , Alexander Soen , Lexing Xie , Miaomiao Liu

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann

In this paper, we show that a simple self-supervised pre-trained audio model can achieve comparable inference efficiency to more complicated pre-trained models with speech transformer encoders. These speech transformers rely on mixing…

Sound · Computer Science 2024-02-09 Sungho Jeon , Ching-Feng Yeh , Hakan Inan , Wei-Ning Hsu , Rashi Rungta , Yashar Mehdad , Daniel Bikel

Attention mechanisms in deep learning architectures have often been used as a means of transparency and, as such, to shed light on the inner workings of the architectures. Recently, there has been a growing interest in whether or not this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

In this work we introduce a new transformer architecture called SparseDistilBERT (SDBERT), which is a combination of sparse attention and knowledge distillantion (KD). We implemented sparse attention mechanism to reduce quadratic dependency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Devaraju Vinoda , Pawan Kumar Yadav

We study the performance of transformer architectures for multivariate time-series forecasting in low-data regimes consisting of only a few years of daily observations. Using synthetically generated processes with known temporal and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Cyril Garcia , Guillaume Remy

In visual generation, the quadratic complexity of attention mechanisms results in high memory and computational costs, especially for longer token sequences required in high-resolution image or multi-frame video generation. To address this,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianchen Zhao , Ke Hong , Xinhao Yang , Xuefeng Xiao , Huixia Li , Feng Ling , Ruiqi Xie , Siqi Chen , Hongyu Zhu , Yichong Zhang , Yu Wang

Sparse attention mechanisms promise to break the quadratic bottleneck of long-context transformers, yet production adoption remains limited by a critical usability gap: optimal hyperparameters vary substantially across layers and models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Arundhathi Dev , Justin Zhan

Although Transformers-based architectures excel at processing textual information, their naive adaptation for tabular data often involves flattening the table structure. This simplification can lead to the loss of essential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Raphaël Mouravieff , Benjamin Piwowarski , Sylvain Lamprier

The quadratic complexity of self-attention during the prefill phase impedes long-context inference in large language models. Existing sparse attention methods face a trade-off among context adaptivity, sampling overhead, and fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Chen Guanzhong

Transformer-based models have become ubiquitous in natural language processing thanks to their large capacity, innate parallelism and high performance. The contextualizing component of a Transformer block is the $\textit{pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-12 Jiing-Ping Wang , Ming-Guang Lin , An-Yeu , Wu

Transformers excel across domains, yet their quadratic attention complexity poses a barrier to scaling. Random-feature attention, as in Performers, can reduce this cost to linear in the sequence length by approximating the softmax kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Amirhossein Farzam , Hossein Mobahi , Nolan Andrew Miller , Luke Sernau

While diffusion language models (DLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARs), existing open-source DLMs suffer from high inference latency. This bottleneck is mainly due to the attention's quadratic complexity with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zeqing Wang , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xingyi Yang , Xinchao Wang

Diffusion models represent a powerful family of generative models widely used for image and video generation. However, the time-consuming deployment, long inference time, and requirements on large memory hinder their applications on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Kafeng Wang , Jianfei Chen , He Li , Zhenpeng Mi , Jun Zhu

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Diffusion Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in video generation. However, their long input sequences incur substantial latency due to the quadratic complexity of full attention. Various sparse attention mechanisms have…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Tongcheng Fang , Hanling Zhang , Ruiqi Xie , Zhuo Han , Xin Tao , Tianchen Zhao , Pengfei Wan , Wenbo Ding , Wanli Ouyang , Xuefei Ning , Yu Wang

Sparse attention has been claimed to increase model interpretability under the assumption that it highlights influential inputs. Yet the attention distribution is typically over representations internal to the model rather than the inputs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Clara Meister , Stefan Lazov , Isabelle Augenstein , Ryan Cotterell

Self-attention has become a defacto choice for capturing global context in various vision applications. However, its quadratic computational complexity with respect to image resolution limits its use in real-time applications, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Abdelrahman Shaker , Muhammad Maaz , Hanoona Rasheed , Salman Khan , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Fahad Shahbaz Khan

The inference process for large language models is slow and memory-intensive, with one of the most critical bottlenecks being excessive Key-Value (KV) cache accesses. This paper introduces "Double Sparsity," a novel post-training sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Shuo Yang , Ying Sheng , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ion Stoica , Lianmin Zheng