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Transformers have emerged as the dominant neural-network architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance in language processing and computer vision. At the core of these models lies the attention mechanism, which requires a nonlinear,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Luis Mickeler , Kai Lion , Alfonso Nardi , Jost Kellner , Pierre Didier , Bhavin J. Shastri , Niao He , Rachel Grange

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

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 attention mechanism in Transformers is an important primitive for accurate and scalable sequence modeling. Its quadratic-compute and linear-memory complexity however remain significant bottlenecks. Linear attention and state-space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Han Guo , Songlin Yang , Tarushii Goel , Eric P. Xing , Tri Dao , Yoon Kim

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

An activation function has crucial role in a deep neural network. A simple rectified linear unit (ReLU) are widely used for the activation function. In this paper, a weighted sigmoid gate unit (WiG) is proposed as the activation function.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-10-04 Masayuki Tanaka

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

There is an increasing interest in the application of deep learning architectures to tabular data. One of the state-of-the-art solutions is TabTransformer which incorporates an attention mechanism to better track relationships between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

Self-attention mechanism is the key of the Transformer but often criticized for its computation demands. Previous token pruning works motivate their methods from the view of computation redundancy but still need to load the full network and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Sihao Lin , Pumeng Lyu , Dongrui Liu , Tao Tang , Xiaodan Liang , Andy Song , Xiaojun Chang

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

Activation functions are essential to introduce nonlinearity into neural networks, with the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) often favored for its simplicity and effectiveness. Motivated by the structural similarity between a shallow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Jiayun Li , Yuxiao Cheng , Yiwen Lu , Zhuofan Xia , Yilin Mo , Gao Huang

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

Transformers with linear recurrent modeling offer linear-time training and constant-memory inference. Despite their demonstrated efficiency and performance, pretraining such non-standard architectures from scratch remains costly and risky.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Disen Lan , Weigao Sun , Jiaxi Hu , Jusen Du , Yu Cheng

While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mingwei Xu , Xuan Lin , Xinnan Guo , Wanqing Xu , Wanyun Cui

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

Linear attention methods offer a compelling alternative to softmax attention due to their efficiency in recurrent decoding. Recent research has focused on enhancing standard linear attention by incorporating gating while retaining its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Yingcong Li , Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Ankit Singh Rawat , Maryam Fazel , Samet Oymak

Non-linear operations such as GELU, Layer normalization, and Softmax are essential yet costly building blocks of Transformer models. Several prior works simplified these operations with look-up tables or integer computations, but such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Joonsang Yu , Junki Park , Seongmin Park , Minsoo Kim , Sihwa Lee , Dong Hyun Lee , Jungwook Choi

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

While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

Attention-based transformers have become the standard architecture in many deep learning fields, primarily due to their ability to model long-range dependencies and handle variable-length input sequences. However, the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Kalle Hilsenbek