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Related papers: Breaking the Attention Bottleneck

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Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaojie Xia , Huigang Zhang , Chaoliang Zhong , Jun Sun , Yusuke Oishi

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have dominated computer vision for years, due to its ability in capturing locality and translation invariance. Recently, many vision transformer architectures have been proposed and they show promising…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Pichao Wang , Xue Wang , Fan Wang , Ming Lin , Shuning Chang , Hao Li , Rong Jin

Recent architectural developments have enabled recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to reach and even surpass the performance of Transformers on certain sequence modeling tasks. These modern RNNs feature a prominent design pattern: linear…

Attention mechanisms have become a cornerstone in modern neural networks, driving breakthroughs across diverse domains. However, their application to graph structured data, where capturing topological connections is essential, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Xuanting Xie , Bingheng Li , Erlin Pan , Rui Hou , Wenyu Chen , Zhao Kang

Latest development of neural models has connected the encoder and decoder through a self-attention mechanism. In particular, Transformer, which is solely based on self-attention, has led to breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Xindian Ma , Peng Zhang , Shuai Zhang , Nan Duan , Yuexian Hou , Dawei Song , Ming Zhou

Current state-of-the-art machine translation systems are based on encoder-decoder architectures, that first encode the input sequence, and then generate an output sequence based on the input encoding. Both are interfaced with an attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-02 Maha Elbayad , Laurent Besacier , Jakob Verbeek

With parallelizable attention networks, the neural Transformer is very fast to train. However, due to the auto-regressive architecture and self-attention in the decoder, the decoding procedure becomes slow. To alleviate this issue, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-08 Biao Zhang , Deyi Xiong , Jinsong Su

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Dongchen Han , Xuran Pan , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang

Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Annette Rios , Chantal Amrhein , Noëmi Aepli , Rico Sennrich

Given the wide and ever growing range of different efficient Transformer attention mechanisms, it is important to identify which attention is most effective when given a task. In this work, we are also interested in combining different…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Dayiheng Liu , Rong Xiao , Derek F. Wong , Haibo Zhang , Boxing Chen , Lidia S. Chao

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Ashish Vaswani , Noam Shazeer , Niki Parmar , Jakob Uszkoreit , Llion Jones , Aidan N. Gomez , Lukasz Kaiser , Illia Polosukhin

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

Multi-head attention is a driving force behind state-of-the-art transformers, which achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision tasks. It has been observed that for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Tam Nguyen , Tan M. Nguyen , Dung D. Le , Duy Khuong Nguyen , Viet-Anh Tran , Richard G. Baraniuk , Nhat Ho , Stanley J. Osher

Multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is a key component of Transformers, a widely popular architecture in both language and vision. Multiple heads intuitively enable different parallel processes over the same input. Yet, they also obscure the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Pooyan Rahmanzadehgervi , Hung Huy Nguyen , Rosanne Liu , Long Mai , Anh Totti Nguyen

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Neşet Özkan Tan , Alex Yuxuan Peng , Joshua Bensemann , Qiming Bao , Tim Hartill , Mark Gahegan , Michael Witbrock

In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenglun Kong , Yize Li , Fanhu Zeng , Lei Xin , Shvat Messica , Xue Lin , Pu Zhao , Manolis Kellis , Hao Tang , Marinka Zitnik