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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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

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

Transformer trackers have achieved impressive advancements recently, where the attention mechanism plays an important role. However, the independent correlation computation in the attention mechanism could result in noisy and ambiguous…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-25 Shenyuan Gao , Chunluan Zhou , Chao Ma , Xinggang Wang , Junsong Yuan

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

In long-context large language model (LLM) inference, the prefill stage dominates computation due to self-attention over the complete input context. Sparse attention significantly reduces self-attention computation by limiting each token's…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Rakshith Jayanth , Viktor Prasanna

Despite many recent works on Mixture of Experts (MoEs) for resource-efficient Transformer language models, existing methods mostly focus on MoEs for feedforward layers. Previous attempts at extending MoE to the self-attention layer fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-02 Róbert Csordás , Piotr Piękos , Kazuki Irie , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Long-context decoding in LLMs is IO-bound: each token re-reads an ever-growing KV cache. Prior accelerations cut bytes via compression, which lowers fidelity, or selection/eviction, which restricts what remains accessible, and both can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Jinghan Yao , Sam Adé Jacobs , Walid Krichene , Masahiro Tanaka , Dhabaleswar K Panda

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly important. However, due to the quadratic time complexity of attention computation, scaling LLMs to longer contexts incurs extremely slow inference speed and high GPU…

The attention mechanism has been the core component in modern transformer architectures. However, the computation of standard full attention scales quadratically with the sequence length, serving as a major bottleneck in long-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yusheng Zhao , Hourun Li , Bohan Wu , Yichun Yin , Lifeng Shang , Jingyang Yuan , Meng Zhang , Ming Zhang

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

The attention module, which is a crucial component in Transformer, cannot scale efficiently to long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Many works focus on approximating the dot-then-exponentiate softmax function in the original…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Shengjie Luo , Shanda Li , Tianle Cai , Di He , Dinglan Peng , Shuxin Zheng , Guolin Ke , Liwei Wang , Tie-Yan Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yu Zhang , Dong Guo , Fang Wu , Guoliang Zhu , Dian Ding , Yiming Zhang

$k$-means has historically been positioned primarily as an offline processing primitive, typically used for dataset organization or embedding preprocessing rather than as a first-class component in online systems. In this work, we revisit…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Shuo Yang , Haocheng Xi , Yilong Zhao , Muyang Li , Xiaoze Fan , Jintao Zhang , Han Cai , Yujun Lin , Xiuyu Li , Kurt Keutzer , Song Han , Chenfeng Xu , Ion Stoica

We present the first unified study of the efficiency of self-attention-based Transformer variants spanning text, speech and vision. We identify input length thresholds (tipping points) at which efficient Transformer variants become more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Anuj Diwan , Eunsol Choi , David Harwath

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Qianchao Zhu , Jiangfei Duan , Chang Chen , Siran Liu , Guanyu Feng , Xin Lv , Xiao Chuanfu , Dahua Lin , Chao Yang

We present FIT: a transformer-based architecture with efficient self-attention and adaptive computation. Unlike original transformers, which operate on a single sequence of data tokens, we divide the data tokens into groups, with each group…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Ting Chen , Lala Li

The paradigm of Transformers using the self-attention mechanism has manifested its advantage in learning graph-structured data. Yet, Graph Transformers are capable of modeling full range dependencies but are often deficient in extracting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Minhong Zhu , Zhenhao Zhao , Weiran Cai

Transformers and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning, with attention mechanisms at the core of their success. As the landscape of attention variants expands, so too do the challenges of optimizing their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Feiyang Chen , Yu Cheng , Lei Wang , Yuqing Xia , Ziming Miao , Lingxiao Ma , Fan Yang , Jilong Xue , Zhi Yang , Mao Yang , Haibo Chen

Transformers have been successfully applied to the visual tracking task and significantly promote tracking performance. The self-attention mechanism designed to model long-range dependencies is the key to the success of Transformers.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-10 Zhihong Fu , Zehua Fu , Qingjie Liu , Wenrui Cai , Yunhong Wang