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Related papers: What Matters in Transformers? Not All Attention is…

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Recently, multiple architectures has been proposed to improve the efficiency of the Transformer Language Models through changing the design of the self-attention block to have a linear-cost inference (LCI). A notable approach in this realm…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Sehyun Choi

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

Transformers have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. A common belief is their attention-based token mixer module contributes most to their competence. However, recent works show the attention-based module in Transformers can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Weihao Yu , Mi Luo , Pan Zhou , Chenyang Si , Yichen Zhou , Xinchao Wang , Jiashi Feng , Shuicheng Yan

Hybrid language models combining attention with state space models (SSMs) or linear attention offer improved efficiency, but whether both components are genuinely utilized remains unclear. We present a functional component ablation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Hector Borobia , Elies Seguí-Mas , Guillermina Tormo-Carbó

Scaling depth is a key driver for large language models (LLMs). Yet, as LLMs become deeper, they often suffer from signal degradation: informative features formed in shallow layers are gradually diluted by repeated residual updates, making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Lianghui Zhu , Yuxin Fang , Bencheng Liao , Shijie Wang , Tianheng Cheng , Zilong Huang , Chen Chen , Lai Wei , Yutao Zeng , Ya Wang , Yi Lin , Yu Li , Xinggang Wang

Deep learning drives a new wave in computing systems and triggers the automation of increasingly complex problems. In particular, Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced cognitive tasks, often matching or even surpassing…

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks by capturing long-range dependencies through self-attention mechanisms. However, long-context modeling faces significant computational inefficiencies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Shuhai Zhang , Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Zhiquan Wen , Qianyue Wang , Zhijie Qiu , Yuanqing Li , Mingkui Tan

Transformer architectures based on the attention mechanism have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), driving major breakthroughs across virtually every NLP task. However, their substantial memory and computational requirements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Riccardo Bravin , Massimo Pavan , Hazem Hesham Yousef Shalby , Fabrizio Pittorino , Manuel Roveri

Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Hongyu Hè , Marko Kabic

Stacking non-linear layers allows deep neural networks to model complicated functions, and including residual connections in Transformer layers is beneficial for convergence and performance. However, residual connections may make the model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Hongfei Xu , Yang Song , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

After their initial success in natural language processing, transformer architectures have rapidly gained traction in computer vision, providing state-of-the-art results for tasks such as image classification, detection, segmentation, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Hugo Touvron , Matthieu Cord , Alaaeldin El-Nouby , Jakob Verbeek , Hervé Jégou

State-of-the-art results in large language models (LLMs) often rely on scale, which becomes computationally expensive. This has sparked a research agenda to reduce these models' parameter counts and computational costs without significantly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Xiuying Wei , Skander Moalla , Razvan Pascanu , Caglar Gulcehre

Recent advances in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their quadratic computational complexity concerning sequence length remains a significant bottleneck…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yefeng Zheng , Yingying Zhang , Derong Xu , Xuetao Wei , Tong Xu , Xiangyu Zhao

This work introduces an efficient method to scale Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to infinitely long inputs with bounded memory and computation. A key component in our proposed approach is a new attention technique dubbed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Tsendsuren Munkhdalai , Manaal Faruqui , Siddharth Gopal

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

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

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Dongseong Hwang , Weiran Wang , Zhuoyuan Huo , Khe Chai Sim , Pedro Moreno Mengibar

Large language models (LLMs) have been a disruptive innovation in recent years, and they play a crucial role in our daily lives due to their ability to understand and generate human-like text. Their capabilities include natural language…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Akrit Mudvari , Yuang Jiang , Leandros Tassiulas