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Vision transformers (ViT) have demonstrated impressive performance across various machine vision problems. These models are based on multi-head self-attention mechanisms that can flexibly attend to a sequence of image patches to encode…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Muzammal Naseer , Kanchana Ranasinghe , Salman Khan , Munawar Hayat , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Ming-Hsuan Yang

Vision Transformers (ViTs) take all the image patches as tokens and construct multi-head self-attention (MHSA) among them. Complete leverage of these image tokens brings redundant computations since not all the tokens are attentive in MHSA.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-15 Youwei Liang , Chongjian Ge , Zhan Tong , Yibing Song , Jue Wang , Pengtao Xie

Vision Transformer (ViT) has made significant advancements in computer vision, thanks to its token mixer's sophisticated ability to capture global dependencies between all tokens. However, the quadratic growth in computational demands as…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Guoan Xu , Wenfeng Huang , Wenjing Jia , Jiamao Li , Guangwei Gao , Guo-Jun Qi

Vision Transformer (ViT) has gained increasing attention in the computer vision community in recent years. However, the core component of ViT, Self-Attention, lacks explicit spatial priors and bears a quadratic computational complexity,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Mingrui Chen , Hongmin Liu , Ran He

Vision Transformers (ViTs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging vision tasks, but their deployment on edge devices is severely hindered by the computational complexity and global reduction bottleneck imposed by layer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Kieran Carrigg , Sigur de Vries , Amirhossein Sadough , Marcel van Gerven

The advent of Vision Transformers (ViTs) marks a substantial paradigm shift in the realm of computer vision. ViTs capture the global information of images through self-attention modules, which perform dot product computations among…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Shuoxi Zhang , Hanpeng Liu , Stephen Lin , Kun He

Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a promising solution for reducing the storage and computational cost of vision transformers (ViTs). Recent advances primarily target at crafting quantizers to deal with peculiar activations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Runqing Jiang , Ye Zhang , Longguang Wang , Pengpeng Yu , Yulan Guo

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

Vision Transformer(ViT) is now dominating many vision tasks. The drawback of quadratic complexity of its token-wise multi-head self-attention (MHSA), is extensively addressed via either token sparsification or dimension reduction (in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-06-21 Haiyang Xu , Zhichao Zhou , Dongliang He , Fu Li , Jingdong Wang

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

At the core of the Transformer, the softmax normalizes the attention matrix to be right stochastic. Previous research has shown that this often de-stabilizes training and that enforcing the attention matrix to be doubly stochastic (through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Jannis Born , Filip Skogh , Kahn Rhrissorrakrai , Filippo Utro , Nico Wagner , Aleksandros Sobczyk

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are becoming more popular and dominating technique for various vision tasks, compare to Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). As a demanding technique in computer vision, ViTs have been successfully solved various…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Khawar Islam

The core for tackling the fine-grained visual categorization (FGVC) is to learn subtle yet discriminative features. Most previous works achieve this by explicitly selecting the discriminative parts or integrating the attention mechanism via…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Jun Wang , Xiaohan Yu , Yongsheng Gao

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

Softmax is popular normalization method used in machine learning. Deep learning solutions like Transformer or BERT use the softmax function intensively, so it is worthwhile to optimize its performance. This article presents our methodology…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Jacek Czaja , Michal Gallus , Tomasz Patejko , Jian Tang

Recent Vision Transformer~(ViT) models have demonstrated encouraging results across various computer vision tasks, thanks to their competence in modeling long-range dependencies of image patches or tokens via self-attention. These models,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Sucheng Ren , Daquan Zhou , Shengfeng He , Jiashi Feng , Xinchao Wang

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

Learning efficient and expressive visual representation has long been the pursuit of computer vision research. While Vision Transformers (ViTs) gradually replace traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) as more scalable vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Quan Kong , Yanru Xiao , Yuhao Shen , Cong Wang

Standard softmax self-attention excels in vision tasks but incurs quadratic complexity O(N^2), limiting high-resolution deployment. Linear attention reduces the cost to O(N), yet its compressed state representations can impair modeling…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ruibang Li , Guan Luo , Yiwei Zhang , Jin Gao , Bing Li , Weiming Hu

As the performance gains from accelerating quantized matrix multiplication plateau, the softmax operation becomes the critical bottleneck in Transformer inference. This bottleneck stems from two hardware limitations: (1) limited data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zisheng Ye , Xiaoyu He , Maoyuan Song , Guoliang Qiu , Chao Liao , Chen Wu , Yonggang Sun , Zhichun Li , Xiaoru Xie , Yuanyong Luo , Hu Liu , Pinyan Lu , Heng Liao