English
Related papers

Related papers: cosFormer: Rethinking Softmax in Attention

200 papers

Transformers have achieved great success in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to the attention mechanism, which assigns an importance score for every word relative to other words in a sequence. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Shrihari Sridharan , Jacob R. Stevens , Kaushik Roy , Anand Raghunathan

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

Transformer-based QA models use input-wide self-attention -- i.e. across both the question and the input passage -- at all layers, causing them to be slow and memory-intensive. It turns out that we can get by without input-wide…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Qingqing Cao , Harsh Trivedi , Aruna Balasubramanian , Niranjan Balasubramanian

This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hemanth Saratchandran , Jianqiao Zheng , Yiping Ji , Wenbo Zhang , Simon Lucey

Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Songlin Yang , Bailin Wang , Yikang Shen , Rameswar Panda , Yoon Kim

The recently proposed Conformer model has become the de facto backbone model for various downstream speech tasks based on its hybrid attention-convolution architecture that captures both local and global features. However, through a series…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-18 Sehoon Kim , Amir Gholami , Albert Shaw , Nicholas Lee , Karttikeya Mangalam , Jitendra Malik , Michael W. Mahoney , Kurt Keutzer

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to self-attention. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the number of inference tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bo Gao , Michael W. Spratling , Letizia Gionfrida

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Recently, transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable performance on audio-visual segmentation (AVS) tasks. However, their expensive computational cost makes real-time inference impractical. By characterizing attention maps of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Zili Wang , Qi Yang , Linsu Shi , Jiazhong Yu , Qinghua Liang , Fei Li , Shiming Xiang

For supervised speech enhancement, contextual information is important for accurate spectral mapping. However, commonly used deep neural networks (DNNs) are limited in capturing temporal contexts. To leverage long-term contexts for tracking…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-13 Xinmeng Xu , Jianjun Hao

While features of different scales are perceptually important to visual inputs, existing vision transformers do not yet take advantage of them explicitly. To this end, we first propose a cross-scale vision transformer, CrossFormer. It…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Wenxiao Wang , Wei Chen , Qibo Qiu , Long Chen , Boxi Wu , Binbin Lin , Xiaofei He , Wei Liu

To capture user preference, transformer models have been widely applied to model sequential user behavior data. The core of transformer architecture lies in the self-attention mechanism, which computes the pairwise attention scores in a…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Zhen Tian , Wayne Xin Zhao , Changwang Zhang , Xin Zhao , Zhongrui Ma , Ji-Rong Wen

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

In deep learning theory, the covariance matrix of the representations serves as a proxy to examine the network's trainability. Motivated by the success of Transformers, we study the covariance matrix of a modified Softmax-based attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-12 Lorenzo Noci , Chuning Li , Mufan Bill Li , Bobby He , Thomas Hofmann , Chris Maddison , Daniel M. Roy

In recent years, transformer-based methods have achieved remarkable progress in medical image segmentation due to their superior ability to capture long-range dependencies. However, these methods typically suffer from two major limitations.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Zunhui Xia , Hongxing Li , Libin Lan

Window-based transformers excel in large-scale point cloud understanding by capturing context-aware representations with affordable attention computation in a more localized manner. However, the sparse nature of point clouds leads to a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Chenhang He , Ruihuang Li , Guowen Zhang , Lei Zhang

The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Chendong Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Wen qi Wei , Xiaoyang Qu , Haoqian Wang , Jing Xiao

Conformer-based attention models have become the de facto backbone model for Automatic Speech Recognition tasks. A blank symbol is usually introduced to align the input and output sequences for CTC or RNN-T models. Unfortunately, the long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-22 Wenjing Zhu , Sining Sun , Changhao Shan , Peng Fan , Qing Yang

Transformer has been widely-used in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and the scaled dot-product attention between tokens is a core module of Transformer. This attention is a token-wise design and its complexity is quadratic to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Shuai Zhang , Peng Zhang , Xindian Ma , Junqiu Wei , Ningning Wang , Qun Liu

We present Lightning Attention, the first linear attention implementation that maintains a constant training speed for various sequence lengths under fixed memory consumption. Due to the issue with cumulative summation operations (cumsum),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong