English
Related papers

Related papers: PolySketchFormer: Fast Transformers via Sketching …

200 papers

Transformer-based video diffusion models (VDMs) deliver state-of-the-art video generation quality but are constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, making long sequences and high resolutions computationally expensive. While…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Mohsen Ghafoorian , Denis Korzhenkov , Amirhossein Habibian

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

Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose $O(N^2)$ complexity with respect to sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xinghao Wang , Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Chenkun Tan , Shaojun Zhou , Zhaoxiang Liu , Shiguo Lian , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xipeng Qiu

Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear attention -- avoiding the expensive pretraining costs. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Michael Zhang , Simran Arora , Rahul Chalamala , Alan Wu , Benjamin Spector , Aaryan Singhal , Krithik Ramesh , Christopher Ré

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chen Zhu , Wei Ping , Chaowei Xiao , Mohammad Shoeybi , Tom Goldstein , Anima Anandkumar , Bryan Catanzaro

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown immense potential in enhancing various aspects of our daily lives, from conversational AI to search and AI assistants. However, their growing capabilities come at the cost of extremely large model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yingyu Liang , Jiangxuan Long , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yufa Zhou

Approximation of non-linear kernels using random feature maps has become a powerful technique for scaling kernel methods to large datasets. We propose $\textit{Tensor Sketch}$, an efficient random feature map for approximating polynomial…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Ninh Pham , Rasmus Pagh

Dot-product attention mechanism plays a crucial role in modern deep architectures (e.g., Transformer) for sequence modeling, however, na\"ive exact computation of this model incurs quadratic time and memory complexities in sequence length,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Amir Zandieh , Insu Han , Majid Daliri , Amin Karbasi

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nurullah Sevim , Ege Ozan Özyedek , Furkan Şahinuç , Aykut Koç

This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hemanth Saratchandran , Jianqiao Zheng , Yiping Ji , Wenbo Zhang , Simon Lucey

The transformer architecture predominates across various models. As the heart of the transformer, attention has a computational complexity of $O(N^2)$, compared to $O(N)$ for linear transformations. When handling large sequence lengths,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Jintao Zhang , Jia Wei , Haofeng Huang , Pengle Zhang , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

The computational and memory demands of vanilla attention scale quadratically with the sequence length $N$, posing significant challenges for processing long sequences in Transformer models. FlashAttention alleviates these challenges by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Guoxia Wang , Jinle Zeng , Xiyuan Xiao , Siming Wu , Jiabin Yang , Lujing Zheng , Zeyu Chen , Jiang Bian , Dianhai Yu , Haifeng Wang

Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Chao Lou , Zixia Jia , Zilong Zheng , Kewei Tu

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

Linearization of attention using various kernel approximation and kernel learning techniques has shown promise. Past methods used a subset of combinations of component functions and weight matrices within the random feature paradigm. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Duke Nguyen , Du Yin , Aditya Joshi , Flora Salim

We present Lightning Attention, the first linear attention implementation that maintains a constant training speed for various sequence lengths under fixed memory consumption. Due to the issue with cumulative summation operations (cumsum),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

State-of-the-art speech-to-text models typically employ Transformer-based encoders that model token dependencies via self-attention mechanisms. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention in both memory and computation imposes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Eva Feillet , Ryan Whetten , David Picard , Alexandre Allauzen

Transformer is a powerful model for text understanding. However, it is inefficient due to its quadratic complexity to input sequence length. Although there are many methods on Transformer acceleration, they are still either inefficient on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie