Related papers: S$^3$Attention: Improving Long Sequence Attention …
In this work, we propose several attention formulations for multivariate sequence data. We build on top of the recently introduced 2D-Attention and reformulate the attention learning methodology by quantifying the relevance of…
Transformers have become the cornerstone of modern large-scale language models, but their reliance on softmax attention poses a computational bottleneck at both training and inference. Recurrent models offer high efficiency, but compressing…
Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…
In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression,…
Long-context models are essential for many applications but face inefficiencies in loading large KV caches during decoding. Prior methods enforce fixed token budgets for sparse attention, assuming a set number of tokens can approximate full…
Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t.…
Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To…
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been recently integrated into Transformer architectures due to their potential to reduce computational demands and to improve power efficiency. Yet, the implementation of the attention mechanism using…
Many advanced Large Language Model (LLM) applications require long-context processing, but the self-attention module becomes a bottleneck during the prefilling stage of inference due to its quadratic time complexity with respect to sequence…
Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…
Attention mechanism remains the defining operator in Transformers since it provides expressive global credit assignment, yet its $O(N^2 d)$ time and memory cost in sequence length $N$ makes long-context modeling expensive and often forces…
The self-attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in recent Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the quadratic computational cost $O(n^2)$ in the input sequence length $n$ is a notorious obstacle for further…
The neural attention mechanism has been incorporated into deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various domains. Most such models use multi-head self-attention which is appealing for the ability to attend to…
We present an approximate attention mechanism named HyperAttention to address the computational challenges posed by the growing complexity of long contexts used in Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent work suggests that in the worst-case…
Self-attention has become an important and widely used neural network component that helped to establish new state-of-the-art results for various applications, such as machine translation and automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, the…
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…
Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability…
Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…
Transformer-based pre-training techniques of text and layout have proven effective in a number of document understanding tasks. Despite this success, multimodal pre-training models suffer from very high computational and memory costs.…
Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…