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Related papers: Fast Attention Requires Bounded Entries

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Min-plus product of two $n\times n$ matrices is a fundamental problem in algorithm research. It is known to be equivalent to APSP, and in general it has no truly subcubic algorithms. In this paper, we focus on the min-plus product on a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Shucheng Chi , Ran Duan , Tianle Xie

Vision Transformers (ViT) serve as powerful vision models. Unlike convolutional neural networks, which dominated vision research in previous years, vision transformers enjoy the ability to capture long-range dependencies in the data.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Moab Arar , Ariel Shamir , Amit H. Bermano

Self-attention has greatly contributed to the success of the widely used Transformer architecture by enabling learning from data with long-range dependencies. In an effort to improve performance, a gated attention model that leverages a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Viet Nguyen , Tuan Minh Pham , Thinh Cao , Tan Dinh , Huy Nguyen , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

The self-attention mechanism, at the heart of the Transformer model, is able to effectively model pairwise interactions between tokens. However, numerous recent works have shown that it is unable to perform basic tasks involving detecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sayak Chakrabarti , Toniann Pitassi , Josh Alman

Attention-based Neural Networks (NN) have demonstrated their effectiveness in accurate memory access prediction, an essential step in data prefetching. However, the substantial computational overheads associated with these models result in…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Pengmiao Zhang , Neelesh Gupta , Rajgopal Kannan , Viktor K. Prasanna

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism remains a fundamental barrier to scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to longer contexts, creating a critical bottleneck in both computation and memory. To address this, we introduce AQUA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Santhosh G S , Saurav Prakash , Balaraman Ravindran

Transformers have become the cornerstone of modern large-scale language models, but their reliance on softmax attention poses a computational bottleneck at both training and inference. Recurrent models offer high efficiency, but compressing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Xiuying Wei , Anunay Yadav , Razvan Pascanu , Caglar Gulcehre

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

We introduce Monte-Carlo Attention (MCA), a randomized approximation method for reducing the computational cost of self-attention mechanisms in Transformer architectures. MCA exploits the fact that the importance of each token in an input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Hyunjun Kim , JeongGil Ko

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Erwan Fagnou , Paul Caillon , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

Low-bit attention, such as SageAttention, has emerged as an effective approach for accelerating model inference, but its applicability to training remains poorly understood. In prior work, we introduced SageBwd, a trainable INT8 attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jintao Zhang , Marco Chen , Haoxu Wang , Kai Jiang , Ion Stoica , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu

The attention module, which is a crucial component in Transformer, cannot scale efficiently to long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Many works focus on approximating the dot-then-exponentiate softmax function in the original…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Shengjie Luo , Shanda Li , Tianle Cai , Di He , Dinglan Peng , Shuxin Zheng , Guolin Ke , Liwei Wang , Tie-Yan Liu

Generating realistic videos with diffusion transformers demands significant computation, with attention layers the central bottleneck; even producing a short clip requires running a transformer over a very long sequence of embeddings, e.g.,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Sankeerth Durvasula , Kavya Sreedhar , Zain Moustafa , Suraj Kothawade , Ashish Gondimalla , Suvinay Subramanian , Narges Shahidi , Nandita Vijaykumar

The Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) mechanism has become a powerful enhancement to the Transformer architecture, which enables models to capture token relationships when encoding positional information. However, the RoPE mechanisms make…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yang Cao , Jiayan Huo , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

There has recently been significant interest in training reinforcement learning (RL) agents in vision-based environments. This poses many challenges, such as high dimensionality and the potential for observational overfitting through…

The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to…

Large language models (LLMs) have played a pivotal role in revolutionizing various facets of our daily existence. Solving attention regression is a fundamental task in optimizing LLMs. In this work, we focus on giving a provable guarantee…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Weixin Wang , Junze Yin

We present a method to stop the evaluation of a prediction process when the result of the full evaluation is obvious. This trait is highly desirable in prediction tasks where a predictor evaluates all its features for every example in large…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2013-01-01 Raphael Pelossof , Zhiliang Ying

Large language models like GPT-4 exhibit emergent capabilities across general-purpose tasks, such as basic arithmetic, when trained on extensive text data, even though these tasks are not explicitly encoded by the unsupervised, next-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Nayoung Lee , Kartik Sreenivasan , Jason D. Lee , Kangwook Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos