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Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

Vision Transformers have achieved impressive performance in video classification, while suffering from the quadratic complexity caused by the Softmax attention mechanism. Some studies alleviate the computational costs by reducing the number…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Kaiyue Lu , Zexiang Liu , Jianyuan Wang , Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Hui Deng , Xiaodong Han , Yuchao Dai , Yiran Zhong

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have set themselves apart with their exceptional performance in complex language modelling tasks. However, these models are also known for their significant computational and storage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Peng Lu , Ivan Kobyzev , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Boxing Chen , Philippe Langlais

Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 O. Duranthon , P. Marion , C. Boyer , B. Loureiro , L. Zdeborová

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yu Zhang , Songlin Yang , Ruijie Zhu , Yue Zhang , Leyang Cui , Yiqiao Wang , Bolun Wang , Freda Shi , Bailin Wang , Wei Bi , Peng Zhou , Guohong Fu

In the realm of deep learning, spatial attention mechanisms have emerged as a vital method for enhancing the performance of convolutional neural networks. However, these mechanisms possess inherent limitations that cannot be overlooked.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xin Zhang , Chen Liu , Degang Yang , Tingting Song , Yichen Ye , Ke Li , Yingze Song

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

New models of the attention-based random forests called LARF (Leaf Attention-based Random Forest) are proposed. The first idea behind the models is to introduce a two-level attention, where one of the levels is the "leaf" attention and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Andrei V. Konstantinov , Lev V. Utkin

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

Transformer-based models have made remarkable progress in image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer hinders its applicability to high-resolution images. Existing methods mitigate this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuang Ai , Huaibo Huang , Tao Wu , Qihang Fan , Ran He

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have proven effective for image processing tasks, such as object recognition and classification. Recently, CNNs have been enhanced with concepts of attention, similar to those found in biology. Much of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-12-10 Grace W. Lindsay

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

Several recent studies have demonstrated the promise of deep visuomotor policies for robot manipulator control. Despite impressive progress, these systems are known to be vulnerable to physical disturbances, such as accidental or…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Pooya Abolghasemi , Amir Mazaheri , Mubarak Shah , Ladislau Bölöni

Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Songlin Yang , Bailin Wang , Yikang Shen , Rameswar Panda , Yoon Kim

While Transformer networks benefit from a global receptive field, their quadratic cost relative to sequence length restricts their application to long sequences and high-resolution inputs. We introduce Fast Multipole Attention (FMA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yanming Kang , Giang Tran , Hans De Sterck

In natural vision, feedback connections support versatile visual inference capabilities such as making sense of the occluded or noisy bottom-up sensory information or mediating pure top-down processes such as imagination. However, the…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-11-01 Tahereh Toosi , Elias B. Issa

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

Unlike conventional frame-based sensors, event-based visual sensors output information through spikes at a high temporal resolution. By only encoding changes in pixel intensity, they showcase a low-power consuming, low-latency approach to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Rohan Ghosh , Anupam Gupta , Siyi Tang , Alcimar Soares , Nitish Thakor