English
Related papers

Related papers: Activator: GLU Activation Function as the Core Com…

200 papers

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

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

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

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

Recently, numerous efficient Transformers have been proposed to reduce the quadratic computational complexity of standard Transformers caused by the Softmax attention. However, most of them simply swap Softmax with an efficient attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-29 Zexiang Liu , Dong Li , Kaiyue Lu , Zhen Qin , Weixuan Sun , Jiacheng Xu , Yiran Zhong

The Transformer architecture has become widely adopted due to its demonstrated success, attributed to the attention mechanism at its core. Despite these successes, the attention mechanism of Transformers is associated with two well-known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 DongNyeong Heo , Heeyoul Choi

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

Transformer has become ubiquitous in natural language processing (e.g., machine translation, question answering); however, it requires enormous amount of computations to achieve high performance, which makes it not suitable for mobile…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-27 Zhanghao Wu , Zhijian Liu , Ji Lin , Yujun Lin , Song Han

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved amazing zero-shot learning performance over a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, especially for text generative tasks. Yet, the large size of LLMs often leads to the high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-21 Yukang Xie , Chengyu Wang , Junbing Yan , Jiyong Zhou , Feiqi Deng , Jun Huang

Speech recognition is largely taking advantage of deep learning, showing that substantial benefits can be obtained by modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). The most popular RNNs are Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs), which typically reach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-03 Mirco Ravanelli , Philemon Brakel , Maurizio Omologo , Yoshua Bengio

Deep learning researchers have a keen interest in proposing two new novel activation functions which can boost network performance. A good choice of activation function can have significant consequences in improving network performance. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

Vision transformers using self-attention or its proposed alternatives have demonstrated promising results in many image related tasks. However, the underpinning inductive bias of attention is not well understood. To address this issue, this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Arda Sahiner , Tolga Ergen , Batu Ozturkler , John Pauly , Morteza Mardani , Mert Pilanci

Motivated in part by their relevance for low-precision training and quantization, massive activations in large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a topic of interest. However, existing analyses are limited in scope, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Louis Owen , Nilabhra Roy Chowdhury , Abhay Kumar , Fabian Güra

Activation functions and attention mechanisms are typically treated as having different purposes and have evolved differently. However, both concepts can be formulated as a non-linear gating function. Inspired by their similarity, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-08-04 Yimian Dai , Stefan Oehmcke , Fabian Gieseke , Yiquan Wu , Kobus Barnard

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

Transformer layers, which use an alternating pattern of multi-head attention and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers, provide an effective tool for a variety of machine learning problems. As the transformer layers use residual connections…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yaofeng Desmond Zhong , Tongtao Zhang , Amit Chakraborty , Biswadip Dey

Neural networks in general, from MLPs and CNNs to attention-based Transformers, are constructed from layers of linear combinations followed by nonlinear operations such as ReLU, Sigmoid, or Softmax. Despite their strength, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Weiguo Lu , Gangnan Yuan , Hong-kun Zhang , Shangyang Li