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State-of-the-art transformer models use pairwise dot-product based self-attention, which comes at a computational cost quadratic in the input sequence length. In this paper, we investigate the global structure of attention scores computed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Ayan Chakrabarti , Himanshu Jain , Sanjiv Kumar , Michal Lukasik , Andreas Veit

We explore the role of attention mechanism during inference in text-conditional diffusion models. Empirical observations suggest that cross-attention outputs converge to a fixed point after several inference steps. The convergence time…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Haozhe Liu , Wentian Zhang , Jinheng Xie , Francesco Faccio , Mengmeng Xu , Tao Xiang , Mike Zheng Shou , Juan-Manuel Perez-Rua , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Self-attention is at the heart of the popular Transformer architecture, yet suffers from quadratic time and memory complexity. The breakthrough FlashAttention algorithm revealed I/O complexity as the true bottleneck in scaling Transformers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Barna Saha , Christopher Ye

Transformer-based models have become ubiquitous in natural language processing thanks to their large capacity, innate parallelism and high performance. The contextualizing component of a Transformer block is the $\textit{pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

The Transformer model is widely successful on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention limit its application on long text. In this paper, adopting a fine-to-coarse attention mechanism on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Zihao Ye , Qipeng Guo , Quan Gan , Xipeng Qiu , Zheng Zhang

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of softmax attention remains a central bottleneck that limits their scalability. Alman and Song (NeurIPS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Vladimir Braverman , Junze Yin , Haochen Zhang

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Achieving reliable 4-bit attention is a prerequisite for end-to-end FP4 computation on emerging FP4-capable GPUs, yet attention remains the main obstacle due to FP4's tiny dynamic range and attention's heavy-tailed activations. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Peiyuan Zhang , Matthew Noto , Wenxuan Tan , Chengquan Jiang , Will Lin , Wei Zhou , Hao Zhang

Much of recent Deep Reinforcement Learning success is owed to the neural architecture's potential to learn and use effective internal representations of the world. While many current algorithms access a simulator to train with a large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Amir Ardalan Kalantari , Mohammad Amini , Sarath Chandar , Doina Precup

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zhen Cheng , Hao-Bo Yang , Wan-Yi Huang , Jin-Long Li

Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years, and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Yelysei Bondarenko , Markus Nagel , Tijmen Blankevoort

Scientific applications in fields such as high energy physics, computational fluid dynamics, and climate science generate vast amounts of data at high velocities. This exponential growth in data production is surpassing the advancements in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Xiao Li , Jaemoon Lee , Anand Rangarajan , Sanjay Ranka

We study the capability of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to accelerate exact and approximate matrix multiplication without using Strassen-like divide-and-conquer. We present a simple exact algorithm running in $O(n^{2.89})$ time, which…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Yahel Uffenheimer , Omri Weinstein

We introduce Attention Free Transformer (AFT), an efficient variant of Transformers that eliminates the need for dot product self attention. In an AFT layer, the key and value are first combined with a set of learned position biases, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Shuangfei Zhai , Walter Talbott , Nitish Srivastava , Chen Huang , Hanlin Goh , Ruixiang Zhang , Josh Susskind

The advent of foundation models have revolutionized various fields, enabling unprecedented task accuracy and flexibility in computational linguistics, computer vision and other domains. Attention mechanism has become an essential component…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Mohammadali Shakerdargah , Shan Lu , Chao Gao , Di Niu

Attention-based deep networks have been successfully applied on textual data in the field of NLP. However, their application on protein sequences poses additional challenges due to the weak semantics of the protein words, unlike the plain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-29 Ashish Ranjan , Md Shah Fahad , Akshay Deepak

In both Computer Vision and the wider Deep Learning field, the Transformer architecture is well-established as state-of-the-art for many applications. For Multitask Learning, however, where there may be many more queries necessary compared…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Christian Bohn , Thomas Kurbiel , Klaus Friedrichs , Hasan Tercan , Tobias Meisen

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Dayiheng Liu , Rong Xiao , Derek F. Wong , Haibo Zhang , Boxing Chen , Lidia S. Chao

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