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The attention mechanism in Transformers is an important primitive for accurate and scalable sequence modeling. Its quadratic-compute and linear-memory complexity however remain significant bottlenecks. Linear attention and state-space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Han Guo , Songlin Yang , Tarushii Goel , Eric P. Xing , Tri Dao , Yoon Kim

Vision transformers using self-attention or its proposed alternatives have demonstrated promising results in many image related tasks. However, the underpinning inductive bias of attention is not well understood. To address this issue, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Arda Sahiner , Tolga Ergen , Batu Ozturkler , John Pauly , Morteza Mardani , Mert Pilanci

The large attention-based encoder-decoder network (Transformer) has become prevailing recently due to its effectiveness. But the high computation complexity of its decoder raises the inefficiency issue. By examining the mathematic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yanyang Li , Ye Lin , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

Transformers have excelled in many tasks including vision. However, efficient deployment of transformer models in low-latency or high-throughput applications is hindered by the computation in the attention mechanism which involves expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-12 John Yang , Le An , Su Inn Park

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning in numerous fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Their strength lies in their attention mechanism, which allows for the discovering of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Uladzislau Yorsh , Martin Holeňa , Ondřej Bojar , David Herel

Linear attention mitigates the quadratic complexity of softmax attention but suffers from a critical loss of expressiveness. We identify two primary causes: (1) The normalization operation cancels the query norm, which breaks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Liangyu Huo , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Xin Li , Zheng Zhang

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

It is a widely known issue that Transformers, when trained on shorter sequences, fail to generalize robustly to longer ones at test time. This raises the question of whether Transformer models are real reasoning engines, despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Ruining Li , Gabrijel Boduljak , Jensen , Zhou

Transformer architectures are now central to sequence modeling tasks. At its heart is the attention mechanism, which enables effective modeling of long-term dependencies in a sequence. Recently, transformers have been successfully applied…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Huijie Pan , Lingpeng Kong

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nurullah Sevim , Ege Ozan Özyedek , Furkan Şahinuç , Aykut Koç

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

Attention-based transformers have become the standard architecture in many deep learning fields, primarily due to their ability to model long-range dependencies and handle variable-length input sequences. However, the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Kalle Hilsenbek

Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Ivan Kobyzev , Abbas Ghaddar , Dingtao Hu , Boxing Chen

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Sung Ju Hwang

The application of transformer-based models on time series forecasting (TSF) tasks has long been popular to study. However, many of these works fail to beat the simple linear residual model, and the theoretical understanding of this issue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yekun Ke , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Chiwun Yang

Transformers have achieved great success in a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks due to the attention mechanism, which assigns an importance score for every word relative to other words in a sequence. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Shrihari Sridharan , Jacob R. Stevens , Kaushik Roy , Anand Raghunathan

Transformer has been widely-used in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and the scaled dot-product attention between tokens is a core module of Transformer. This attention is a token-wise design and its complexity is quadratic to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-13 Shuai Zhang , Peng Zhang , Xindian Ma , Junqiu Wei , Ningning Wang , Qun Liu