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Related papers: On The Computational Complexity of Self-Attention

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Attention-based models, exemplified by the Transformer, can effectively model long range dependency, but suffer from the quadratic complexity of self-attention operation, making them difficult to be adopted for high-resolution image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Long Zhao , Zizhao Zhang , Ting Chen , Dimitris N. Metaxas , Han Zhang

Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence…

Attention mechanism has been extensively integrated within mainstream neural network architectures, such as Transformers and graph attention networks. Yet, its underlying working principles remain somewhat elusive. What is its essence? Are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Tianyu Ruan , Shihua Zhang

As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Eli Sason , Darya Frolova , Boris Nazarov , Felix Goldberd

Deep learning models have been widely applied in various aspects of daily life. Many variant models based on deep learning structures have achieved even better performances. Attention-based architectures have become almost ubiquitous in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Zhiying Fang , Yidong Ouyang , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Guang Cheng

We propose a new attention mechanism with linear complexity, ATP, that fixates \textbf{A}ttention on \textbf{T}op \textbf{P}rincipal keys, rather than on each individual token. Particularly, ATP is driven by an important observation that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Yue Niu , Saurav Prakash , Salman Avestimehr

We revisit the I/O complexity of attention in large language models. Given query-key-value matrices $Q,K,V\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, and a machine with fast memory size $M$, the goal is to compute the "attention matrix" $A=\text{softmax}(Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Pál András Papp , Aleksandros Sobczyk , Anastasios Zouzias

The Transformer architecture has been successful across many domains, including natural language processing, computer vision and speech recognition. In keyword spotting, self-attention has primarily been used on top of convolutional or…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-11 Axel Berg , Mark O'Connor , Miguel Tairum Cruz

The quadratic cost of attention in transformers motivated the development of efficient approaches: namely sparse and sliding window attention, convolutions and linear attention. Although these approaches result in impressive reductions in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Jatin Prakash , Aahlad Puli , Rajesh Ranganath

In this paper, we propose that the dot product pairwise matching attention layer, which is widely used in Transformer-based models, is redundant for the model performance. Attention, in its original formulation, has to be seen rather as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko , Vojtěch Vančura , Daniel Vašata , Pavel Kordík , Tomáš Mikolov

Contemporary diffusion models built upon U-Net or Diffusion Transformer (DiT) architectures have revolutionized image generation through transformer-based attention mechanisms. The prevailing paradigm has commonly employed self-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-01 ZiYi Dong , Chengxing Zhou , Weijian Deng , Pengxu Wei , Xiangyang Ji , Liang Lin

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

We examine the intrinsic (within the attention head) and extrinsic (amongst the attention heads) structure of the self-attention mechanism in transformers. Theoretical evidence for invariance of the self-attention mechanism to softmax…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-19 Oluwadamilola Fasina , Ruben V. C. Pohle , Pei-Chun Su , Ronald R. Coifman

End-to-end paradigms have demonstrated great potential for autonomous driving. Additionally, most existing methods are built upon Transformer architectures. However, transformers incur a quadratic attention cost, limiting their ability to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Jihao Huang , Xi Xia , Zhiyuan Li , Tianle Liu , Jingke Wang , Junbo Chen , Tengju Ye

Transformer is a powerful tool for many natural language tasks which is based on self-attention, a mechanism that encodes the dependence of other tokens on each specific token, but the computation of self-attention is a bottleneck due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Madhusudan Verma

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. The key component of Transformers is self-attention, which learns the relationship between any two tokens in the input sequence. Recent studies have revealed that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Hyowon Wi , Jeongwhan Choi , Noseong Park

Transformers have been successful in many vision tasks, thanks to their capability of capturing long-range dependency. However, their quadratic computational complexity poses a major obstacle for applying them to vision tasks requiring…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Shitao Tang , Jiahui Zhang , Siyu Zhu , Ping Tan

Transformers are one of the most successful architectures of modern neural networks. At their core there is the so-called attention mechanism, which recently interested the physics community as it can be written as the derivative of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-25 Francesco D'Amico , Matteo Negri

The remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks, spanning various applications in natural language processing and computer vision, is attributed to the critical role of self-attention. Similar to the development of most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Rachel S. Y. Teo , Tan M. Nguyen