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Pre-trained language models (PLM) have demonstrated their effectiveness for a broad range of information retrieval and natural language processing tasks. As the core part of PLM, multi-head self-attention is appealing for its ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Shanshan Wang , Zhumin Chen , Zhaochun Ren , Huasheng Liang , Qiang Yan , Pengjie Ren

Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Sinong Wang , Belinda Z. Li , Madian Khabsa , Han Fang , Hao Ma

Attention patterns play a crucial role in both training and inference of large language models (LLMs). Prior works have identified individual patterns such as retrieval heads, sink heads, and diagonal traces, yet these observations remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Qingyue Yang , Jie Wang , Xing Li , Yinqi Bai , Xialiang Tong , Huiling Zhen , Jianye Hao , Mingxuan Yuan , Bin Li

In this work, we investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) adapt their internal representations when encountering inputs of increasing difficulty, quantified as the degree of out-of-distribution (OOD) shift. We reveal a consistent and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Mingyu Jin , Yutong Yin , Jingcheng Niu , Qingcheng Zeng , Wujiang Xu , Mengnan Du , Wei Cheng , Zhaoran Wang , Tianlong Chen , Dimitris N. Metaxas

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Accelerating large language model (LLM) inference is critical for real-world deployments requiring high throughput and low latency. Contextual sparsity, where each token dynamically activates only a small subset of the model parameters,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Susav Shrestha , Brad Settlemyer , Nikoli Dryden , Narasimha Reddy

We introduce a method for sparsifying distributed algorithms and exhibit how it leads to improvements that go past known barriers in two algorithmic settings of large-scale graph processing: Massively Parallel Computation (MPC), and Local…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-07-18 Mohsen Ghaffari , Jara Uitto

Pruning is a highly effective approach for compressing large language models (LLMs), significantly reducing inference latency. However, conventional training-free structured pruning methods often employ a heuristic metric that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Songtao Liu , Peng Liu

In this paper, to remedy this deficiency, we propose a Linear Attention Mechanism which is approximate to dot-product attention with much less memory and computational costs. The efficient design makes the incorporation between attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-08-21 Rui Li , Jianlin Su , Chenxi Duan , Shunyi Zheng

Attention serves as the fundamental mechanism for long-context modeling in large language models (LLMs), yet dense attention becomes structurally prohibitive for long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Consequently, sparse attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Junxiang Qiu , Shuo Wang , Zhengsu Chen , Hengheng Zhang , Jinda Lu , Changcheng Li , Qi Tian

With the increasing volumes of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the expanding context lengths, attention computation has become a key performance bottleneck in LLM serving. For fast attention computation, recent practices often parallelize…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Di Liu , Yifei Liu , Chen Chen , Zhibin Yu , Xiaoyi Fan , Quan Chen , Minyi Guo

In-context learning is a remarkable property of transformers and has been the focus of recent research. An attention mechanism is a key component in transformers, in which an attention matrix encodes relationships between words in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Katsuyuki Hagiwara

While sparse attention mitigates the computational bottleneck of long-context LLM training, its distributed training process exhibits extreme heterogeneity in both \textit{1)} sequence length and \textit{2)} sparsity sensitivity, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Hongtao Xu , Jianchao Tan , Yuxuan Hu , Pengju Lu , Hongyu Wang , Pingwei Sun , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Mingzhen Li , Weile Jia

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional reasoning abilities, enabling strong generalization across diverse tasks such as commonsense reasoning and instruction following. However, as LLMs scale, inference costs become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker , Benedikt Staffler , Frank Hutter , Aaron Klein

Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yu Chen , Runkai Chen , Sheng Yi , Xinda Zhao , Xiaohong Li , Jianjin Zhang , Jun Sun , Chuanrui Hu , Yunyun Han , Lidong Bing , Yafeng Deng , Tianqiao Chen

Despite an in-principle understanding of self-attention matrix operations in Transformer language models (LMs), it remains unclear precisely how these operations map onto interpretable computations or functions--and how or when individual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Pamela D. Rivière , Sean Trott

We investigate the internal behavior of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) when they generate factually incorrect text. We propose modeling factual queries as constraint satisfaction problems and use this framework to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Mert Yuksekgonul , Varun Chandrasekaran , Erik Jones , Suriya Gunasekar , Ranjita Naik , Hamid Palangi , Ece Kamar , Besmira Nushi

The self-attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in recent Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the quadratic computational cost $O(n^2)$ in the input sequence length $n$ is a notorious obstacle for further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yingyu Liang , Heshan Liu , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Zhuoyan Xu , Junze Yin

Sparsity-based models and techniques have been exploited in many signal processing and imaging applications. Data-driven methods based on dictionary and sparsifying transform learning enable learning rich image features from data, and can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Saiprasad Ravishankar , Anna Ma , Deanna Needell

Large models and enormous data are essential driving forces of the unprecedented successes achieved by modern algorithms, especially in scientific computing and machine learning. Nevertheless, the growing dimensionality and model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Yijun Dong