Related papers: cosFormer: Rethinking Softmax in Attention

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…

Transformer-based models are unable to process long sequences due to their self-attention operation, which scales quadratically with the sequence length. To address this limitation, we introduce the Longformer with an attention mechanism…

The dot product self-attention (DPSA) is a fundamental component of transformers. However, scaling them to long sequences, like documents or high-resolution images, becomes prohibitively expensive due to quadratic time and memory…

Transformers have transformed the field of natural language processing. This performance is largely attributed to the use of stacked self-attention layers, each of which consists of matrix multiplies as well as softmax operations. As a…

Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…

Linear attention mitigates the quadratic complexity of softmax attention but suffers from a critical loss of expressiveness. We identify two primary causes: (1) The normalization operation cancels the query norm, which breaks the…

The self-attention mechanism distinguishes transformer-based large language models (LLMs) apart from convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Despite the performance improvement, achieving real-time LLM inference on silicon remains…

Transformer is a transformative framework that models sequential data and has achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of tasks, but with high computational and energy cost. To improve its efficiency, a popular choice is to compress…

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to…

Transformer-based video diffusion models (VDMs) deliver state-of-the-art video generation quality but are constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, making long sequences and high resolutions computationally expensive. While…

Transformers are among the state of the art for many tasks in speech, vision, and natural language processing, among others. Self-attentions, which are crucial contributors to this performance have quadratic computational complexity, which…

Efficiently handling long contexts in transformer-based language models with low perplexity is an active area of research. Numerous recent approaches like Linformer, Longformer, Performer, and Structured state space models (SSMs)., have not…

Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax…

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…

Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…