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Related papers: Self-attention Does Not Need $O(n^2)$ Memory

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Transformers have emerged as a powerful tool for a broad range of natural language processing tasks. A key component that drives the impressive performance of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism that encodes the influence or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yunyang Xiong , Zhanpeng Zeng , Rudrasis Chakraborty , Mingxing Tan , Glenn Fung , Yin Li , Vikas Singh

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

The most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) models today are Transformers employing self-attention. In its standard form, self-attention incurs costs that increase with context length, driving demand for storage, compute, and energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Franz A. Heinsen , Leo Kozachkov

Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Penghao Yu , Haotian Jiang , Zeyu Bao , Ruoxi Yu , Qianxiao Li

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized deep learning on sequential data, becoming ubiquitous in state-of-the-art solutions for a wide variety of applications. Yet vanilla Transformers are notoriously resource-expensive, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Valerii Likhosherstov , Krzysztof Choromanski , Jared Davis , Xingyou Song , Adrian Weller

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Attention mechanisms, especially self-attention, have played an increasingly important role in deep feature representation for visual tasks. Self-attention updates the feature at each position by computing a weighted sum of features using…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Meng-Hao Guo , Zheng-Ning Liu , Tai-Jiang Mu , Shi-Min Hu

In recent years, the popular Transformer architecture has achieved great success in many application areas, including natural language processing and computer vision. Many existing works aim to reduce the computational and memory complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Zhe Chen

The standard content-based attention mechanism typically used in sequence-to-sequence models is computationally expensive as it requires the comparison of large encoder and decoder states at each time step. In this work, we propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-07-04 Denny Britz , Melody Y. Guan , Minh-Thang Luong

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

The self-attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in recent Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the quadratic computational cost $O(n^2)$ in the input sequence length $n$ is a notorious obstacle for further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yingyu Liang , Heshan Liu , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Zhuoyan Xu , Junze Yin

Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input's length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Angelos Katharopoulos , Apoorv Vyas , Nikolaos Pappas , François Fleuret

In this paper, we propose \textbf{Superlinear attention}, a fully trainable multi-step attention architecture that achieves subquadratic complexity for long sequences while preserving \textbf{random context access} (a.k.a.\ structural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yufeng Huang

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Venmugil Elango

Self-attention, as the key block of transformers, is a powerful mechanism for extracting features from the inputs. In essence, what self-attention does is to infer the pairwise relations between the elements of the inputs, and modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Lemeng Wu , Xingchao Liu , Qiang Liu

In this work, we propose several attention formulations for multivariate sequence data. We build on top of the recently introduced 2D-Attention and reformulate the attention learning methodology by quantifying the relevance of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-27 Kateryna Chumachenko , Alexandros Iosifidis , Moncef Gabbouj

The success of self-attention lies in its ability to capture long-range dependencies and enhance context understanding, but it is limited by its computational complexity and challenges in handling sequential data with inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Md Kowsher , Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Chun-Nam Yu , Ozlem Ozmen Garibay , Niloofar Yousefi