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Related papers: Transformer Quality in Linear Time

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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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Can Yaras , Alec S. Xu , Pierre Abillama , Changwoo Lee , Laura Balzano

The point cloud learning community witnesses a modeling shift from CNNs to Transformers, where pure Transformer architectures have achieved top accuracy on the major learning benchmarks. However, existing point Transformers are…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Zhang Cheng , Haocheng Wan , Xinyi Shen , Zizhao Wu

Despite being the current de-facto models in most NLP tasks, transformers are often limited to short sequences due to their quadratic attention complexity on the number of tokens. Several attempts to address this issue were studied, either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Amine Abdaoui , Sourav Dutta

We study length generalization in sequence models on a composite problem involving both state tracking and associative recall. Prior work finds that recurrent networks handle state tracking well but struggle with recall, whereas…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Buu Phan , Reza Ebrahimi , Sanjay Haresh , Roland Memisevic

Transformers, adapted from natural language processing, are emerging as a leading approach for graph representation learning. Contemporary graph transformers often treat nodes or edges as separate tokens. This approach leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Zihan Pengmei , Zimu Li , Chih-chan Tien , Risi Kondor , Aaron R. Dinner

This paper introduces Generalized Attention Flow (GAF), a novel feature attribution method for Transformer-based models to address the limitations of current approaches. By extending Attention Flow and replacing attention weights with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Behrooz Azarkhalili , Maxwell Libbrecht

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Neşet Özkan Tan , Alex Yuxuan Peng , Joshua Bensemann , Qiming Bao , Tim Hartill , Mark Gahegan , Michael Witbrock

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann

To address the high resolution of image pixels, the Swin Transformer introduces window attention. This mechanism divides an image into non-overlapping windows and restricts attention computation to within each window, significantly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Zhendong Zhang

Autoregressive Transformers are strong language models but incur O(T) complexity during per-token generation due to the self-attention mechanism. Recent work proposes kernel-based methods to approximate causal self-attention by replacing it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Huanru Henry Mao

Random feature attention (RFA) adopts random fourier feature (RFF) methods to approximate the softmax function, resulting in a linear time and space attention mechanism that enables the construction of an efficient Transformer. Inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Yuhan Guo , Lizhong Ding , Ye Yuan , Guoren Wang

Transformer models achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. They however suffer from a prohibitive limitation due to the self-attention mechanism, inducing $O(n^2)$ complexity with regard to sequence length. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Charles Condevaux , Sébastien Harispe

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kewei Zhang , Ye Huang , Yufan Deng , Jincheng Yu , Junsong Chen , Huan Ling , Enze Xie , Daquan Zhou

Transformer-based models, such as BERT and GPT, have been widely adopted in natural language processing (NLP) due to their exceptional performance. However, recent studies show their vulnerability to textual adversarial attacks where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Lujia Shen , Yuwen Pu , Shouling Ji , Changjiang Li , Xuhong Zhang , Chunpeng Ge , Ting Wang

Efficiently supporting long context length is crucial for Transformer models. The quadratic complexity of the self-attention computation plagues traditional Transformers. Sliding window-based static sparse attention mitigates the problem by…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Zhenyu Bai , Pranav Dangi , Huize Li , Tulika Mitra

While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mingwei Xu , Xuan Lin , Xinnan Guo , Wanqing Xu , Wanyun Cui

The attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in different machine learning tasks. However, the quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length of the vanilla softmax-based attention mechanism becomes the major…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-05 Chong Wu , Maolin Che , Renjie Xu , Zhuoheng Ran , Hong Yan

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh