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Related papers: Replacing softmax with ReLU in Vision Transformers

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Rectified linear unit (ReLU) is a widely used activation function for deep convolutional neural networks. However, because of the zero-hard rectification, ReLU networks miss the benefits from negative values. In this paper, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-30 Suo Qiu , Xiangmin Xu , Bolun Cai

Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Angeliki Giannou , Liu Yang , Tianhao Wang , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Jason D. Lee

The transformer's attention mechanism has revolutionized AI and machine learning, with its efficient computation being crucial to its performance. However, calculating attention involves matrix operations interspersed with softmax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Kosmas Alexandridis , Vasileios Titopoulos , Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos

The generation of factually incorrect objects, commonly known as object hallucination, remains a persistent challenge in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Current approaches to address this issue - ranging from expensive data-driven…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yuanzhi Xu , Qian Gao , Jun Fan , Guohui Ding , Zhenyu Yang , Sixue Lin , Yuteng Xiao

We study conditions under which transformers using soft attention can simulate hard attention, that is, effectively focus all attention on a subset of positions. First, we examine several subclasses of languages recognized by hard-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Andy Yang , Lena Strobl , David Chiang , Dana Angluin

In this study, SoftReMish, a new activation function designed to improve the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks, is proposed. Using the MNIST dataset, a standard CNN architecture consisting of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Mustafa Bayram Gücen

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

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT4, have shown outstanding performance in many human life task. Attention computation plays an important role in training LLMs. Softmax unit and ReLU unit are the key structure in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-17 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Shenghao Xie

Attention architectures are widely used; they recently gained renewed popularity with Transformers yielding a streak of state of the art results. Yet, the geometrical implications of softmax-attention remain largely unexplored. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate, generating factually incorrect yet confident assertions. We argue this stems from the Transformer's Softmax function, which creates "Artificial Certainty" by collapsing ambiguous attention scores…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Shihao Ji , Zihui Song , Jiajie Huang

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

Transformers' quadratic computational complexity limits their scalability despite remarkable performance. While linear attention reduces this to linear complexity, pre-training such models from scratch remains, in most cases, prohibitively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Martin Benfeghoul , Teresa Delgado , Adnan Oomerjee , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang , Zafeirios Fountas

The computational cost of softmax-based attention in transformers limits their applicability to long-context tasks. Adaptive sparsity, of which $\alpha$-entmax attention is an example, offers a flexible data-dependent alternative, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Nuno Gonçalves , Marcos Treviso , André F. T. Martins

While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

Transformer-based architectures have demonstrated remarkable success across various domains, but their deployment on edge devices remains challenging due to high memory and computational demands. In this paper, we introduce a novel Reuse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Seul-Ki Yeom , Tae-Ho Kim

Transformers have emerged as the dominant neural-network architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance in language processing and computer vision. At the core of these models lies the attention mechanism, which requires a nonlinear,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Luis Mickeler , Kai Lion , Alfonso Nardi , Jost Kellner , Pierre Didier , Bhavin J. Shastri , Niao He , Rachel Grange

Currently, lightweight hybrid backbone networks have partially alleviated the issue of computational saturation, but the imbalance in computational efficiencys between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and attention mechanisms is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Fengyun Li , Chao Zheng , Yangyang Fang , Jialiang Lan , Jianhua Liang , Luhao Zhang , Fa Si

Gated Linear Units (GLU) have shown great potential in enhancing neural network performance. In this paper, I introduce a novel attention mechanism called GLU Attention, which introduces nonlinearity into the values of Attention. My…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Zehao Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have numerous real-life applications across various domains, such as natural language translation, sentiment analysis, language modeling, chatbots and conversational agents, creative writing, text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Junze Yin

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang