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The transformer architecture predominates across various models. As the heart of the transformer, attention has a computational complexity of $O(N^2)$, compared to $O(N)$ for linear transformations. When handling large sequence lengths,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Jintao Zhang , Jia Wei , Haofeng Huang , Pengle Zhang , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

State-of-the-art ASR systems have achieved promising results by modeling local and global interactions separately. While the former can be computed efficiently, global interactions are usually modeled via attention mechanisms, which are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Florian Mai , Juan Zuluaga-Gomez , Titouan Parcollet , Petr Motlicek

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nurullah Sevim , Ege Ozan Özyedek , Furkan Şahinuç , Aykut Koç

Symbolic music generation aims to generate music scores automatically. A recent trend is to use Transformer or its variants in music generation, which is, however, suboptimal, because the full attention cannot efficiently model the…

Sound · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Botao Yu , Peiling Lu , Rui Wang , Wei Hu , Xu Tan , Wei Ye , Shikun Zhang , Tao Qin , Tie-Yan Liu

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) with only image-level supervision is a challenging task. Most existing methods exploit Class Activation Maps (CAM) to generate pixel-level pseudo labels for supervised training. However, due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-17 Ruiwen Li , Zheda Mai , Chiheb Trabelsi , Zhibo Zhang , Jongseong Jang , Scott Sanner

Recent advances in video diffusion models have shifted towards transformer-based architectures, achieving state-of-the-art video generation but at the cost of quadratic attention complexity, which severely limits scalability for longer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Chao Lou , Zixia Jia , Zilong Zheng , Kewei Tu

Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice. We bridge this gap by analyzing standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Moritz Brösamle , Stephan Eckstein

Long-sequence video diffusion transformers hit a quadratic self-attention cost that dominates runtime and memory for very long token sequences. Most efficient attention methods use one approximation everywhere, yet video features are…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Haopeng Jin

Person re-identification aims to retrieve persons in highly varying settings across different cameras and scenarios, in which robust and discriminative representation learning is crucial. Most research considers learning representations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-21 Haochen Wang , Jiayi Shen , Yongtuo Liu , Yan Gao , Efstratios Gavves

Standard inference and training with transformer based architectures scale quadratically with input sequence length. This is prohibitively large for a variety of applications especially in web-page translation, query-answering etc.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Lovish Madaan , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Himanshu Jain , Prateek Jain

While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yining Li , Dongchen Han , Zeyu Liu , Hanyi Wang , Yulin Wang , Gao Huang

While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi

Transformer-based architectures achieved breakthrough performance in natural language processing and computer vision, yet they remain inferior to simpler linear baselines in multivariate long-term forecasting. To better understand this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Romain Ilbert , Ambroise Odonnat , Vasilii Feofanov , Aladin Virmaux , Giuseppe Paolo , Themis Palpanas , Ievgen Redko

While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Dongseong Hwang , Weiran Wang , Zhuoyuan Huo , Khe Chai Sim , Pedro Moreno Mengibar

Transformers are expensive to train due to the quadratic time and space complexity in the self-attention mechanism. On the other hand, although kernel machines suffer from the same computation bottleneck in pairwise dot products, several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Yifan Chen , Qi Zeng , Heng Ji , Yun Yang

The attention mechanism is a pivotal element within the transformer architecture, making a substantial contribution to its exceptional performance. Within this attention mechanism, Softmax is an imperative component that enables the model…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Tianhua Xia , Sai Qian Zhang

Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N^2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Guanghui Qin , Yukun Feng , Benjamin Van Durme

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

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