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After DETR was proposed, this novel transformer-based detection paradigm which performs several cross-attentions between object queries and feature maps for predictions has subsequently derived a series of transformer-based detection heads.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Xiaohu Jiang , Ze Chen , Zhicheng Wang , Erjin Zhou , ChunYuan

Multi-head, key-value attention is the backbone of the widely successful Transformer model and its variants. This attention mechanism uses multiple parallel key-value attention blocks (called heads), each performing two fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Sarthak Mittal , Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Irina Rish , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Adam Filipek

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models employ attention mechanisms to discover image locations that are most relevant for answering a specific question. For this purpose, several multimodal fusion strategies have been proposed, ranging from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Moshiur R Farazi , Salman H Khan , Nick Barnes

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

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

The attention mechanism forms the foundational blocks for transformer language models. Recent approaches show that scaling the model achieves human-level performance. However, with increasing demands for scaling and constraints on hardware…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sai Sena Chinnakonduru , Astarag Mohapatra

Self-attention in Transformers is typically implemented as $\mathrm{softmax}(QK^\top/\sqrt{d})V$, where $Q=XW_Q$, $K=XW_K$, and $V=XW_V$ are learned linear projections of the input $X$. We ask whether these learned projections are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Debarshi Kundu , Archisman Ghosh , Swaroop Ghosh , Vasant Honavar

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Venmugil Elango

Attention is a core operation in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We present BD Attention (BDA), the first lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention. BDA is enabled by a simple matrix identity from Basis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jialin Zhao

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

We study attention mechanisms through the lens of a canonical unsupervised problem: principal component analysis (PCA). We show that, when trained on Gaussian data, both softmax and linear attention layers learn parameters that align with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Claire Boyer

Pairwise dot-product self-attention is key to the success of transformers that achieve state-of-the-art performance across a variety of applications in language and vision. This dot-product self-attention computes attention weights among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Stefan K. Nielsen , Laziz U. Abdullaev , Rachel S. Y. Teo , Tan M. Nguyen

Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Zhuo Li , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Xiangtai Li , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

Existing attention mechanisms are trained to attend to individual items in a collection (the memory) with a predefined, fixed granularity, e.g., a word token or an image grid. We propose area attention: a way to attend to areas in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-11 Yang Li , Lukasz Kaiser , Samy Bengio , Si Si

Towards better unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). Recently, researchers propose various domain-conditioned attention modules and make promising progresses. However, considering that the configuration of attention, i.e., the type and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Kekai Sheng , Ke Li , Xiawu Zheng , Jian Liang , Weiming Dong , Feiyue Huang , Rongrong Ji , Xing Sun

Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Jiaxu Liu , Yuhe Bai , Xiangyu Yin , Christos-Savvas Bouganis

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zihan Qiu , Zekun Wang , Bo Zheng , Zeyu Huang , Kaiyue Wen , Songlin Yang , Rui Men , Le Yu , Fei Huang , Suozhi Huang , Dayiheng Liu , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Although attention mechanisms have been applied to a variety of deep learning models and have been shown to improve the prediction performance, it has been reported to be vulnerable to perturbations to the mechanism. To overcome the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Shunsuke Kitada , Hitoshi Iyatomi

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nan Ding , Xinjie Fan , Zhenzhong Lan , Dale Schuurmans , Radu Soricut