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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

Attention, specifically scaled dot-product attention, has proven effective for natural language, but it does not have a mechanism for handling hierarchical patterns of arbitrary nesting depth, which limits its ability to recognize certain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Brian DuSell , David Chiang

We introduce the $2$-simplicial Transformer, an extension of the Transformer which includes a form of higher-dimensional attention generalising the dot-product attention, and uses this attention to update entity representations with tensor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-15 James Clift , Dmitry Doryn , Daniel Murfet , James Wallbridge

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Transformers have achieved remarkable progress in time series forecasting, yet their reliance on deterministic dot-product attention limits their capacity to model uncertainty and nonlinear dependencies across multivariate temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Bulent Haznedar , Levent Karacan

In this paper, we share our reflections and insights on understanding Transformer architectures through the lens of associative memory--a classic psychological concept inspired by human cognition. We start with the basics of associative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shu Zhong , Mingyu Xu , Tenglong Ao , Guang Shi

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in sequential recommender systems (SRSs). However, computing the attention matrix in traditional dot-product attention mechanisms results in a quadratic complexity with sequence lengths,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Langming Liu , Xiangyu Zhao , Chi Zhang , Jingtong Gao , Wanyu Wang , Wenqi Fan , Yiqi Wang , Ming He , Zitao Liu , Qing Li

Linear attention has emerged as a promising direction for scaling Vision Transformers beyond the quadratic cost of dense self-attention. A prevalent strategy is to compress spatial tokens into a compact set of intermediate proxies that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yuntong Li , Hainuo Wang , Hengxing Liu , Mingjia Li , Xiaojie Guo

We prove that a minimal Transformer with frozen weights emulates a broad class of algorithms by in-context prompting. We formalize two modes of in-context algorithm emulation. In the task-specific mode, for any continuous function $f:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Hude Liu , Jennifer Yuntong Zhang , Han Liu

In deep learning theory, the covariance matrix of the representations serves as a proxy to examine the network's trainability. Motivated by the success of Transformers, we study the covariance matrix of a modified Softmax-based attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-12 Lorenzo Noci , Chuning Li , Mufan Bill Li , Bobby He , Thomas Hofmann , Chris Maddison , Daniel M. Roy

In this paper, we apply the self-attention from the state-of-the-art Transformer in Attention Is All You Need for the first time to a data-driven operator learning problem related to partial differential equations. An effort is put together…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Shuhao Cao

Character-level string-to-string transduction is an important component of various NLP tasks. The goal is to map an input string to an output string, where the strings may be of different lengths and have characters taken from different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Shijie Wu , Pamela Shapiro , Ryan Cotterell

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 complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

Processing 3D data efficiently has always been a challenge. Spatial operations on large-scale point clouds, stored as sparse data, require extra cost. Attracted by the success of transformers, researchers are using multi-head attention for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Mahdi Saleh , Yige Wang , Nassir Navab , Benjamin Busam , Federico Tombari

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks. However, their `large' scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Chaoran Zhang , Lixin Zou , Dan Luo , Min Tang , Xiangyang Luo , Zihao Li , Chenliang Li

Equivariance to symmetries has proven to be a powerful inductive bias in deep learning research. Recent works on mesh processing have concentrated on various kinds of natural symmetries, including translations, rotations, scaling, node…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Sourya Basu , Jose Gallego-Posada , Francesco Viganò , James Rowbottom , Taco Cohen

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Transformer-based models have achieved dominant performance in numerous NLP tasks. Despite their remarkable successes, pre-trained transformers such as BERT suffer from a computationally expensive self-attention mechanism that interacts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jungmin Yun , Mihyeon Kim , Youngbin Kim