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Large language models (LLMs) have shown their power in different areas. Attention computation, as an important subroutine of LLMs, has also attracted interests in theory. Recently the static computation and dynamic maintenance of attention…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Yichuan Deng , Sridhar Mahadevan , Zhao Song

The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to…

Time series forecasting is essential for many practical applications, with the adoption of transformer-based models on the rise due to their impressive performance in NLP and CV. Transformers' key feature, the attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 PeiSong Niu , Tian Zhou , Xue Wang , Liang Sun , Rong Jin

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

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

The attention mechanism is the key to large language models, and the attention matrix serves as an algorithmic and computational bottleneck for such a scheme. In this paper, we define two problems, motivated by designing fast algorithms for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Zhao Song , Junze Yin , Lichen Zhang

Transformer architectures are now central to sequence modeling tasks. At its heart is the attention mechanism, which enables effective modeling of long-term dependencies in a sequence. Recently, transformers have been successfully applied…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Huijie Pan , Lingpeng Kong

The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Dongchen Han , Tianyu Li , Ziyi Wang , Gao Huang

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Sung Ju Hwang

Attention-based architectures have become ubiquitous in machine learning, yet our understanding of the reasons for their effectiveness remains limited. This work proposes a new way to understand self-attention networks: we show that their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Yihe Dong , Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas

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

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

We introduce Attention Free Transformer (AFT), an efficient variant of Transformers that eliminates the need for dot product self attention. In an AFT layer, the key and value are first combined with a set of learned position biases, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Shuangfei Zhai , Walter Talbott , Nitish Srivastava , Chen Huang , Hanlin Goh , Ruixiang Zhang , Josh Susskind

Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input's length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Angelos Katharopoulos , Apoorv Vyas , Nikolaos Pappas , François Fleuret

Self-attention, as the key block of transformers, is a powerful mechanism for extracting features from the inputs. In essence, what self-attention does is to infer the pairwise relations between the elements of the inputs, and modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Lemeng Wu , Xingchao Liu , Qiang Liu

Transformers can under some circumstances generalize to novel problem instances whose constituent parts might have been encountered during training, but whose compositions have not. What mechanisms underlie this ability for compositional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Simon Schug , Seijin Kobayashi , Yassir Akram , João Sacramento , Razvan Pascanu

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

The Transformer architecture is widely deployed in many popular and impactful Large Language Models. At its core is the attention mechanism for calculating correlations between pairs of tokens. Performing an attention computation takes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Josh Alman , Hantao Yu

It is widely accepted from transformer research that "attention is all we need", but the amount of attention required has never been systematically quantified. Is quadratic $O(L^2)$ attention necessary, or is there a sub-quadratic attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yufeng Huang

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