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Recently, large language models (LLMs) have achieved huge success in the natural language processing (NLP) field, driving a growing demand to extend their deployment from the cloud to edge devices. However, deploying LLMs on…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Yanbiao Liang , Huihong Shi , Haikuo Shao , Zhongfeng Wang

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

In this paper, we introduce harmonic loss as an alternative supervisory signal for training neural networks and large language models (LLMs). Harmonic loss differs from standard cross-entropy loss by (a) replacing the usual SoftMax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 David D. Baek , Ziming Liu , Riya Tyagi , Max Tegmark

There have been significant advancements made by large language models (LLMs) in various aspects of our daily lives. LLMs serve as a transformative force in natural language processing, finding applications in text generation, translation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Zhihang Li , Zhao Song , Zifan Wang , Junze Yin

As large language models (LLMs) continue to scale in size, the computational overhead has become a major bottleneck for task-specific fine-tuning. While low-rank adaptation (LoRA) effectively curtails this cost by confining the weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yilang Zhang , Xiaodong Yang , Yiwei Cai , Georgios B. Giannakis

SoftMax is a ubiquitous ingredient of modern machine learning algorithms. It maps an input vector onto a probability simplex and reweights the input by concentrating the probability mass at large entries. Yet, as a smooth approximation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yuxuan Zhou , Mario Fritz , Margret Keuper

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit two striking and ostensibly unrelated behaviours: in-context learning (ICL) and repetitive generation. In both, the model behaves as though it had summarised the context into a population-level statistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Haoren Xu , Guanhua Fang

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has advanced speech processing but suffers from quadratic complexity due to self-attention. To address this, SummaryMixing (SM) has been proposed as a linear-time alternative that summarizes entire utterances…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-11 Aditya Srinivas Menon , Kumud Tripathi , Raj Gohil , Pankaj Wasnik

Cross-entropy loss together with softmax is arguably one of the most common used supervision components in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Despite its simplicity, popularity and excellent performance, the component does not explicitly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-21 Weiyang Liu , Yandong Wen , Zhiding Yu , Meng Yang

Deploying Small Language Models (SLMs) on edge platforms is critical for real-time, privacy-sensitive generative AI, yet constrained by memory, latency, and energy budgets. Quantization reduces model size and cost but suffers from device…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Nilesh Prasad Pandey , Jangseon Park , Onat Gungor , Flavio Ponzina , Tajana Rosing

Existing attention accelerators often trade exact softmax semantics, depend on fused Tensor Core kernels, or incur sequential depth that limits FP32 throughput on long sequences. We present \textbf{ELSA}, an algorithmic reformulation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Chih-Chung Hsu , Xin-Di Ma , Wo-Ting Liao , Chia-Ming Lee

Today's high performance deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) rely heavily on parameter optimization, which is sequential in nature and even with a powerful GPU, would have taken weeks to train them up for solving challenging tasks [22].…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-02-12 Kean Hong Lau , Yong Haur Tay , Fook Loong Lo

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve impressive performance but are limited by the quadratic complexity of self-attention, which prevents their deployment on edge devices and makes their understanding of high-resolution images and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Hongjie Wang , Niraj K. Jha

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

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the natural language processing paradigm but impose substantial demands on memory and computational resources. Quantization is one of the most effective ways to reduce memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Xilong Xie , Liang Wang , Limin Xiao , Meng Han , Lin Sun , Shuai Zheng , Xiangrong Xu

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

The softmax attention mechanism has emerged as a noteworthy development in the field of Artificial Intelligence research, building on the successes of Transformer-based architectures. However, their ever increasing sizes necessitate ever…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Luca Herranz-Celotti , Ermal Rrapaj

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a pivotal approach to adapting large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks; however, performance often suffers from the ``seesaw phenomenon'', where indiscriminate parameter updates yield progress on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Yao Wang , Di Liang , Minlong Peng

The demand for efficient large language model (LLM) inference has propelled the development of dedicated accelerators. As accelerators are vulnerable to hardware faults due to aging, variation, etc, existing accelerator designs often…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Tong Xie , Jiawang Zhao , Zishen Wan , Zuodong Zhang , Yuan Wang , Runsheng Wang , Ru Huang , Meng Li

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chunyuan Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Yuanyuan Xu , Jiarui Liu , T. S. Eugene Ng , Hanjie Chen