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Related papers: On The Computational Complexity of Self-Attention

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Self-attention and masked self-attention are at the heart of Transformers' outstanding success. Still, our mathematical understanding of attention, in particular of its Lipschitz properties - which are key when it comes to analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Valérie Castin , Pierre Ablin , Gabriel Peyré

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…

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

Time series forecasting is crucial for applications across multiple domains and various scenarios. Although Transformer models have dramatically advanced the landscape of forecasting, their effectiveness remains debated. Recent findings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Dongbin Kim , Jinseong Park , Jaewook Lee , Hoki Kim

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

Training causal transformers at extreme sequence lengths is bottlenecked by the quadratic time and memory of scaled dot-product attention (SDPA). In this work, we propose Lighthouse Attention, a training-only symmetrical selection-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Bowen Peng , Subho Ghosh , Jeffrey Quesnelle

Recently, Transformers have shown promising performance in various vision tasks. To reduce the quadratic computation complexity caused by the global self-attention, various methods constrain the range of attention within a local region to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Sitong Wu , Tianyi Wu , Haoru Tan , Guodong Guo

The highly popular Transformer architecture, based on self-attention, is the foundation of large pretrained models such as BERT, that have become an enduring paradigm in NLP. While powerful, the computational resources and time required to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-31 Ran Tian , Joshua Maynez , Ankur P. Parikh

Multi-head self-attention forms the core of Transformer networks. However, their quadratically growing complexity with respect to the input sequence length impedes their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. We address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Zuzana Jelčicová , Marian Verhelst

Entity tracking requires maintaining and updating latent states for entities and attributes over long sequences. Recent task-specific attention operators can compress deep Transformer stacks into a few layers by performing multi-hop state…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hangyue Zhao , Paul Caillon , Erwan Fagnou , Alexandre Allauzen

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

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Self-attention has become an important and widely used neural network component that helped to establish new state-of-the-art results for various applications, such as machine translation and automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-08 Niko Moritz , Takaaki Hori , Jonathan Le Roux

Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Xiaoxuan Yang , Peilin Chen , Tergel Molom-Ochir , Yiran Chen

Transformers have driven remarkable breakthroughs in natural language processing and computer vision, yet their standard attention mechanism still imposes O(N^2) complexity, hindering scalability to longer sequences. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Yoshihiro Yamada

Transformer-based architectures are the most used architectures in many deep learning fields like Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision or Speech processing. It may encourage the direct use of Transformers in the constrained tasks,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-29 Youness Dkhissi , Valentin Vielzeuf , Elys Allesiardo , Anthony Larcher

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

We propose a causal interpretation of self-attention in the Transformer neural network architecture. We interpret self-attention as a mechanism that estimates a structural equation model for a given input sequence of symbols (tokens). The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Raanan Y. Rohekar , Yaniv Gurwicz , Shami Nisimov

This paper reveals that we can interpret the fundamental function of Randomized Time Warping (RTW) as a type of self-attention mechanism, a core technology of Transformers in motion recognition. The self-attention is a mechanism that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Yutaro Hiraoka , Kazuya Okamura , Kota Suto , Kazuhiro Fukui

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

Transformer-based models are not efficient in processing long sequences due to the quadratic space and time complexity of the self-attention modules. To address this limitation, Linformer and Informer are proposed to reduce the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Yifan Chen , Qi Zeng , Dilek Hakkani-Tur , Di Jin , Heng Ji , Yun Yang
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