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At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fanqi Yan , Huy Nguyen , Pedram Akbarian , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

Attention architectures are widely used; they recently gained renewed popularity with Transformers yielding a streak of state of the art results. Yet, the geometrical implications of softmax-attention remain largely unexplored. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Although transformers have become the neural architectures of choice for natural language processing, they require orders of magnitude more training data, GPU memory, and computations in order to compete with convolutional neural networks…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-10-04 Pranav Jeevan , Amit Sethi

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

While transformers have begun to dominate many tasks in vision, applying them to large images is still computationally difficult. A large reason for this is that self-attention scales quadratically with the number of tokens, which in turn,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Daniel Bolya , Cheng-Yang Fu , Xiaoliang Dai , Peizhao Zhang , Judy Hoffman

The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Giorgio Roffo , Hazem Abdelkawy , Nilli Lavie , Luke Palmer

The versatility of self-attention mechanism earned transformers great success in almost all data modalities, with limitations on the quadratic complexity and difficulty of training. Efficient transformers, on the other hand, often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Minh Lenhat , Viet Anh Nguyen , Khoa Nguyen , Duong Duc Hieu , Dao Huu Hung , Truong Son Hy

While the multi-branch architecture is one of the key ingredients to the success of computer vision tasks, it has not been well investigated in natural language processing, especially sequence learning tasks. In this work, we propose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-07-28 Yang Fan , Shufang Xie , Yingce Xia , Lijun Wu , Tao Qin , Xiang-Yang Li , Tie-Yan Liu

Transformers are widely used across various applications, many of which yield sparse or partially filled attention matrices. Examples include attention masks designed to reduce the quadratic complexity of attention, sequence packing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Agniv Sharma , Jonas Geiping

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuan Cao , Dong Wang

Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Zhen Qin , Weixuan Sun , Hui Deng , Dongxu Li , Yunshen Wei , Baohong Lv , Junjie Yan , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong

Linear attention transformers have become a strong alternative to softmax attention due to their efficiency. However, linear attention tends to be less expressive and results in reduced accuracy compared to softmax attention. To bridge the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

The Transformer model architecture has become one of the most widely used in deep learning and the attention mechanism is at its core. The standard attention formulation uses a softmax operation applied to a scaled dot product between query…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Hariprasath Govindarajan , Per Sidén , Jacob Roll , Fredrik Lindsten

Self-attention mechanisms, especially multi-head self-attention (MSA), have achieved great success in many fields such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, many existing vision transformer (ViT) works simply inherent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-17 Leijie Wu , Song Guo , Yaohong Ding , Junxiao Wang , Wenchao Xu , Richard Yida Xu , Jie Zhang

FlashAttention-style online softmax enables exact attention computation with linear memory by streaming score tiles through on-chip memory and maintaining a running maximum and normalizer. However, as attention kernels approach peak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yupeng Sun , Yanzhao Li , Zhiqiang Zou , Bai Du , Zhiyuan Zhang , Hui Dong , Gaoyige Fan , Hui Wang

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Training stable biological foundation models requires rethinking attention mechanisms: we find that using sigmoid attention as a drop in replacement for softmax attention a) produces better learned representations: on six diverse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Vijay Sadashivaiah , Georgios Dasoulas , Judith Mueller , Soumya Ghosh

Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang

Existing adaptation techniques typically require architectural modifications or added parameters, leading to high computational costs and complexity. We introduce Attention Projection Layer Adaptation (APLA), a simple approach to adapt…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Moein Sorkhei , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith , Christos Matsoukas