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The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

While Transformers are dominated by Floating-Point (FP) Matrix-Multiplications, their aggressive acceleration through dedicated hardware or many-core programmable systems has shifted the performance bottleneck to non-linear functions like…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Run Wang , Gamze Islamoglu , Andrea Belano , Viviane Potocnik , Francesco Conti , Angelo Garofalo , Luca Benini

Since the introduction of the Transformer architecture for large language models, the softmax-based attention layer has faced increasing scrutinity due to its quadratic-time computational complexity. Attempts have been made to replace it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Robert Forchheimer

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 wide adoption and substantial computational resource requirements of attention-based Transformers have spurred the demand for efficient hardware accelerators. Unlike digital-based accelerators, there is growing interest in exploring…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Huize Li , Dan Chen , Tulika Mitra

Attention-based models, exemplified by the Transformer, can effectively model long range dependency, but suffer from the quadratic complexity of self-attention operation, making them difficult to be adopted for high-resolution image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Long Zhao , Zizhao Zhang , Ting Chen , Dimitris N. Metaxas , Han Zhang

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jusen Du , Jiaxi Hu , Tao Zhang , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

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…

The softmax function is crucial in Transformer attention, which normalizes each row of the attention scores with summation to one, achieving superior performances over other alternative functions. However, the softmax function can face a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chuanyang Zheng , Yihang Gao , Guoxuan Chen , Han Shi , Jing Xiong , Xiaozhe Ren , Chao Huang , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Yu Li

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 achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Can Yaras , Alec S. Xu , Pierre Abillama , Changwoo Lee , Laura Balzano

This paper introduces EasyAnimate, an efficient and high quality video generation framework that leverages diffusion transformers to achieve high-quality video production, encompassing data processing, model training, and end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Jiaqi Xu , Kunzhe Huang , Xinyi Zou , Yunkuo Chen , Bo Liu , MengLi Cheng , Jun Huang , Xing Shi

Self-attention has become a defacto choice for capturing global context in various vision applications. However, its quadratic computational complexity with respect to image resolution limits its use in real-time applications, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Abdelrahman Shaker , Muhammad Maaz , Hanoona Rasheed , Salman Khan , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Fahad Shahbaz Khan

Attention for transformers is a critical workload that has recently received significant "attention" as a target for custom acceleration. Yet, while prior work succeeds in reducing attention's memory-bandwidth requirements, it creates load…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Nandeeka Nayak , Xinrui Wu , Toluwanimi O. Odemuyiwa , Michael Pellauer , Joel S. Emer , Christopher W. Fletcher

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-$k$…

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Transformer attention is typically implemented using softmax normalization, which enforces attention weights with unit sum normalization. While effective in many settings, this constraint can limit flexibility in controlling attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Jeongin Bae , Baeseong Park , Gunho Park , Minsub Kim , Joonhyung Lee , Junhee Yoo , Sunghyeon Woo , Jiwon Ryu , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Transformers have excelled in many tasks including vision. However, efficient deployment of transformer models in low-latency or high-throughput applications is hindered by the computation in the attention mechanism which involves expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-12 John Yang , Le An , Su Inn Park