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Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters have drastically transformed AI applications. However, their demanding computation during inference has raised significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices.…

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Trevor Dohm , Eric C. Larson

Random-feature-based attention (RFA) is an efficient approximation of softmax attention with linear runtime and space complexity. However, the approximation gap between RFA and conventional softmax attention is not well studied. Built upon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Lin Zheng , Jianbo Yuan , Chong Wang , Lingpeng Kong

Transformers with linear attention (i.e., linear transformers) and state-space models have recently been suggested as a viable linear-time alternative to transformers with softmax attention. However, these models still underperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Songlin Yang , Bailin Wang , Yu Zhang , Yikang Shen , Yoon Kim

While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yining Li , Dongchen Han , Zeyu Liu , Hanyi Wang , Yulin Wang , Gao Huang

Existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit insufficient visual attention, leading to hallucinations. To alleviate this problem, some previous studies adjust and amplify visual attention. These methods present a limitation that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jingyi Wang , Fei Li , Rujie Liu

Vision Transformer (ViT) self-attention mechanism is characterized by feature collapse in deeper layers, resulting in the vanishing of low-level visual features. However, such features can be helpful to accurately represent and identify…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Anxhelo Diko , Danilo Avola , Marco Cascio , Luigi Cinque

The attention mechanism is a pivotal element within the transformer architecture, making a substantial contribution to its exceptional performance. Within this attention mechanism, Softmax is an imperative component that enables the model…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-09-05 Tianhua Xia , Sai Qian Zhang

After their initial success in natural language processing, transformer architectures have rapidly gained traction in computer vision, providing state-of-the-art results for tasks such as image classification, detection, segmentation, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Hugo Touvron , Matthieu Cord , Alaaeldin El-Nouby , Jakob Verbeek , Hervé Jégou

We revisit the design choices in Transformers, and propose methods to address their weaknesses in handling long sequences. First, we propose a simple layer named gated attention unit, which allows the use of a weaker single-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Weizhe Hua , Zihang Dai , Hanxiao Liu , Quoc V. Le

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Naoki Nishikawa , Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

Balancing accuracy and latency on high-resolution images is a critical challenge for lightweight models, particularly for Transformer-based architectures that often suffer from excessive latency. To address this issue, we introduce…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Junzhou Li , Manqi Zhao , Yilin Gao , Zhiheng Yu , Yin Li , Dongsheng Jiang , Li Xiao

The self-attention mechanism distinguishes transformer-based large language models (LLMs) apart from convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Despite the performance improvement, achieving real-time LLM inference on silicon remains…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Shiwei Liu , Guanchen Tao , Yifei Zou , Derek Chow , Zichen Fan , Kauna Lei , Bangfei Pan , Dennis Sylvester , Gregory Kielian , Mehdi Saligane

Transformers have shown dominant performance across a range of domains including language and vision. However, their computational cost grows quadratically with the sequence length, making their usage prohibitive for resource-constrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Yinghan Long , Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury , Kaushik Roy

Softmax is widely used in neural networks for multiclass classification, gate structure and attention mechanisms. The statistical assumption that the input is normal distributed supports the gradient stability of Softmax. However, when used…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Shulun Wang , Bin Liu , Feng Liu

Transformers have significantly advanced AI and machine learning through their powerful attention mechanism. However, computing attention on long sequences can become a computational bottleneck. FlashAttention mitigates this by fusing the…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kosmas Alexandridis , Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos

Vision Transformers (ViTs) that leverage self-attention mechanism have shown superior performance on many classical vision tasks compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and gain increasing popularity recently. Existing ViTs works…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-29 Xinghua Xue , Cheng Liu , Ying Wang , Bing Yang , Tao Luo , Lei Zhang , Huawei Li , Xiaowei Li

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ashkan Shakarami , Yousef Yeganeh , Azade Farshad , Lorenzo Nicolè , Stefano Ghidoni , Nassir Navab

The recent success of Vision Transformers has generated significant interest in attention mechanisms and transformer architectures. Although existing methods have proposed spiking self-attention mechanisms compatible with spiking neural…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Sanaz Mahmoodi Takaghaj
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