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VRAM requirements for transformer models scale quadratically with context length due to the self-attention mechanism. In this paper we modify the decoder-only transformer, replacing self-attention with InAttention, which scales linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Joseph Eisner

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

The highly popular Transformer architecture, based on self-attention, is the foundation of large pretrained models such as BERT, that have become an enduring paradigm in NLP. While powerful, the computational resources and time required to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-31 Ran Tian , Joshua Maynez , Ankur P. Parikh

Recent advances in attention-free sequence models rely on convolutions as alternatives to the attention operator at the core of Transformers. In particular, long convolution sequence models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many…

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zecheng Tang , Quantong Qiu , Yi Yang , Zhiyi Hong , Haiya Xiang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Document-level Neural Machine Translation (DocNMT) has been proven crucial for handling discourse phenomena by introducing document-level context information. One of the most important directions is to input the whole document directly to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Zihan Liu , Zewei Sun , Shanbo Cheng , Shujian Huang , Mingxuan Wang

Transformer-based models have achieved dominant performance in numerous NLP tasks. Despite their remarkable successes, pre-trained transformers such as BERT suffer from a computationally expensive self-attention mechanism that interacts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jungmin Yun , Mihyeon Kim , Youngbin Kim

Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari

With the introduction of Transformers, different attention-based models have been proposed for image segmentation with promising results. Although self-attention allows capturing of long-range dependencies, it suffers from a quadratic…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-10-10 Ken C. L. Wong , Hongzhi Wang , Tanveer Syeda-Mahmood

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Zhenhai Zhu , Radu Soricut

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on autoregressive, decoder-only Transformers generate text one token at a time, where a token represents a discrete unit of text. As each newly produced token is appended to the partial output sequence,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Dimitrios Kafetzis , Ramin Khalili , Iordanis Koutsopoulos

Inference with Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) on long sequences is both costly and slow due to the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism. We introduce Star Attention, a two-phase block-sparse approximation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Shantanu Acharya , Fei Jia , Boris Ginsburg

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Prajwal Singhania , Siddharth Singh , Shwai He , Soheil Feizi , Abhinav Bhatele

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

Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Hongyu Hè , Marko Kabic

Due to the highly parallelizable architecture, Transformer is faster to train than RNN-based models and popularly used in machine translation tasks. However, at inference time, each output word requires all the hidden states of the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Chengyi Wang , Shuangzhi Wu , Shujie Liu

The per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Luke McDermott , Robert W. Heath , Rahul Parhi

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