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Related papers: More Expressive Attention with Negative Weights

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Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Chayne Thrash , Yikun Bai , Keaton Hamm , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to self-attention. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the number of inference tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bo Gao , Michael W. Spratling , Letizia Gionfrida

At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fanqi Yan , Huy Nguyen , Pedram Akbarian , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

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

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

To improve the robustness of transformer neural networks used for temporal-dynamics prediction of chaotic systems, we propose a novel attention mechanism called easy attention which we demonstrate in time-series reconstruction and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Marcial Sanchis-Agudo , Yuning Wang , Roger Arnau , Luca Guastoni , Jasmin Lim , Karthik Duraisamy , Ricardo Vinuesa

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

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

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

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

Most of the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are based on the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model with an encoder-decoder framework equipped with the attention mechanism. However, the conventional attention mechanism treats the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-28 Junyang Lin , Xu Sun , Xuancheng Ren , Muyu Li , Qi Su

Transformers have become prevalent in computer vision due to their performance and flexibility in modelling complex operations. Of particular significance is the 'cross-attention' operation, which allows a vector representation (e.g. of an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-08 Ali Athar , Jonathon Luiten , Alexander Hermans , Deva Ramanan , Bastian Leibe

Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Dong-Jae Lee , Sunghyun Baek , Junmo Kim

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

Attention regulates information transfer between tokens. For this, query and key vectors are compared, typically in terms of a scalar product, $\mathbf{Q}^T\mathbf{K}$, together with a subsequent softmax normalization. In geometric terms,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Claudius Gros

Attention mechanisms represent a fundamental paradigm shift in neural network architectures, enabling models to selectively focus on relevant portions of input sequences through learned weighting functions. This monograph provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Hasi Hays

Transformers have recently shown superior performances on various vision tasks. The large, sometimes even global, receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power over their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Zhuofan Xia , Xuran Pan , Shiji Song , Li Erran Li , Gao Huang

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović