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In Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, particularly for video generation, attention latency is a major bottleneck due to the long sequence length and the quadratic complexity. We find that attention weights can be separated into two parts:…

Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Dustin Wang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Steven Abreu , Yong Shan , Taylor Kergan , Yuqi Pan , Yuhong Chou , Zheng Li , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Jason Eshraghian

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Hongwu Peng , Shaoyi Huang , Shiyang Chen , Bingbing Li , Tong Geng , Ang Li , Weiwen Jiang , Wujie Wen , Jinbo Bi , Hang Liu , Caiwen Ding

As the core operator of Transformers, Softmax Attention exhibits excellent global modeling capabilities. However, its quadratic complexity limits its applicability to vision tasks. In contrast, Linear Attention shares a similar formulation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Yuang Ai , Ran He

Computational workloads composing traditional transformer models are starkly bifurcated. Multi-Head Attention (MHA) and Grouped-Query Attention are memory-bound due to low arithmetic intensity, while FeedForward Networks are compute-bound.…

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kewei Zhang , Ye Huang , Yufan Deng , Jincheng Yu , Junsong Chen , Huan Ling , Enze Xie , Daquan Zhou

The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Ran He

While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuan Cao , Dong Wang

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

FlashAttention (Dao, 2023) effectively reduces the quadratic peak memory usage to linear in training transformer-based large language models (LLMs) on a single GPU. In this paper, we introduce DISTFLASHATTN, a distributed memory-efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Dacheng Li , Rulin Shao , Anze Xie , Eric P. Xing , Xuezhe Ma , Ion Stoica , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Hao Zhang

Transformer-based models have made remarkable progress in image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer hinders its applicability to high-resolution images. Existing methods mitigate this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuang Ai , Huaibo Huang , Tao Wu , Qihang Fan , Ran He

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

The quadratic computational and memory complexities of the Transformer's attention mechanism have limited its scalability for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we propose Luna, a linear unified nested attention mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Xuezhe Ma , Xiang Kong , Sinong Wang , Chunting Zhou , Jonathan May , Hao Ma , Luke Zettlemoyer

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

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Qinglin Zhang , Siqi Zheng , Shiliang Zhang , Chong Deng , Hai Yu , Jiaqing Liu , Yukun Ma , Chong Zhang

Linear Transformers have gained attention as efficient alternatives to standard Transformers, but their performance in retrieval and long-context tasks has been limited. To address these limitations, recent work has explored two distinct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Songlin Yang , Jan Kautz , Ali Hatamizadeh

Linear attention offers a linear-time alternative to self-attention but often struggles to capture long-range patterns. We revisit linear attention through a prediction-correction lens and show that prevalent variants can be written as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xunhao Lai , Jialiang Kang , Jianqiao Lu , Tong Lin , Pengyu Zhao

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yuhong Chou , Man Yao , Kexin Wang , Yuqi Pan , Ruijie Zhu , Yiran Zhong , Yu Qiao , Jibin Wu , Bo Xu , Guoqi Li