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The quadratic complexity of softmax attention presents a major obstacle for scaling Transformers to high-resolution vision tasks. Existing linear attention variants often replace the softmax with Gaussian kernels to reduce complexity, but…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Zhe Feng , Sen Lian , Changwei Wang , Muyang Zhang , Tianlong Tan , Rongtao Xu , Weiliang Meng , Xiaopeng Zhang

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

The quadratic time and memory complexity inherent to self-attention mechanisms, with respect to sequence length, presents a critical computational bottleneck in the training and deployment of large-scale Transformer-based language models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Praneeth Kacham , Vahab Mirrokni , Peilin Zhong

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

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…

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

Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Chayne Thrash , Yikun Bai , Keaton Hamm , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Dongchen Han , Xuran Pan , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

The Transformer-based model have made significant strides in semantic matching tasks by capturing connections between phrase pairs. However, to assess the relevance of sentence pairs, it is insufficient to just examine the general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Bo Li , Di Liang , Zixin Zhang

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chen Zhu , Wei Ping , Chaowei Xiao , Mohammad Shoeybi , Tom Goldstein , Anima Anandkumar , Bryan Catanzaro

The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Firas Khader , Omar S. M. El Nahhas , Tianyu Han , Gustav Müller-Franzes , Sven Nebelung , Jakob Nikolas Kather , Daniel Truhn

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

The Transformer architecture has become a cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence, but its core self-attention mechanism suffers from a complexity bottleneck that scales quadratically with sequence length, severely limiting its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zhongpan Tang
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