English
Related papers

Related papers: Attention Approximates Sparse Distributed Memory

200 papers

Transformers have emerged as viable alternatives to convolutional neural networks owing to their ability to learn non-local region relationships in the spatial domain. The self-attention mechanism of the transformer enables transformers to…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-08-09 Rahul G. S. , Sriprabha Ramnarayanan , Mohammad Al Fahim , Keerthi Ram , Preejith S. P , Mohanasankar Sivaprakasam

Recently, Transformer-based image restoration networks have achieved promising improvements over convolutional neural networks due to parameter-independent global interactions. To lower computational cost, existing works generally limit…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jiale Zhang , Yulun Zhang , Jinjin Gu , Yongbing Zhang , Linghe Kong , Xin Yuan

Transformers have recently shown superior performances on various vision tasks. The large, sometimes even global, receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power over their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Zhuofan Xia , Xuran Pan , Shiji Song , Li Erran Li , Gao Huang

The increasing demand for long-context modeling in large language models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the quadratic complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism. The community has proposed sparse attention to mitigate this issue.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingze Shi , Yifan Wu , Yiran Peng , Bingheng Wu , Liangdong Wang , Guang Liu , Yuyu Luo

The computing cost of transformer self-attention often necessitates breaking long documents to fit in pretrained models in document ranking tasks. In this paper, we design Query-Directed Sparse attention that induces IR-axiomatic structures…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Jyun-Yu Jiang , Chenyan Xiong , Chia-Jung Lee , Wei Wang

As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Eli Sason , Darya Frolova , Boris Nazarov , Felix Goldberd

The success of Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) stems from their attention mechanism. While this mechanism has been extensively studied in explainability research, particularly through the attention values obtained during the forward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko

Attention mechanisms in deep neural networks have achieved excellent performance on sequence-prediction tasks. Here, we show that these recently-proposed attention-based mechanisms---in particular, the Transformer with its parallelizable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Zhengxuan Wu , Xiyu Zhang , Tan Zhi-Xuan , Jamil Zaki , Desmond C. Ong

Self-supervised learning holds promise to revolutionize molecule property prediction - a central task to drug discovery and many more industries - by enabling data efficient learning from scarce experimental data. Despite significant…

Recently, Transformer networks have redefined the state of the art in many NLP tasks. However, these models suffer from quadratic computational cost in the input sequence length $n$ to compute pairwise attention in each layer. This has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Chulhee Yun , Yin-Wen Chang , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

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

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

Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Weilin Zhao , Zihan Zhou , Zhou Su , Chaojun Xiao , Yuxuan Li , Yanghao Li , Yudi Zhang , Weilun Zhao , Zhen Li , Yuxiang Huang , Ao Sun , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu

We investigate the integration of human-like working memory constraints into the Transformer architecture and implement several cognitively inspired attention variants, including fixed-width windows based and temporal decay based attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Pranava Madhyastha , Dagmar Adamcova

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

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Qinglin Zhang , Siqi Zheng , Shiliang Zhang , Chong Deng , Hai Yu , Jiaqing Liu , Yukun Ma , Chong Zhang

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Michael E. Sander , Pierre Ablin , Mathieu Blondel , Gabriel Peyré