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Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have set themselves apart with their exceptional performance in complex language modelling tasks. However, these models are also known for their significant computational and storage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Peng Lu , Ivan Kobyzev , Mehdi Rezagholizadeh , Boxing Chen , Philippe Langlais

Transformers have improved the state-of-the-art across numerous tasks in sequence modeling. Besides the quadratic computational and memory complexity w.r.t the sequence length, the self-attention mechanism only processes information at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Yao Zhang , Yunpu Ma , Thomas Seidl , Volker Tresp

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown immense potential in enhancing various aspects of our daily lives, from conversational AI to search and AI assistants. However, their growing capabilities come at the cost of extremely large model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Yingyu Liang , Jiangxuan Long , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yufa Zhou

Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Zhen Qin , Weixuan Sun , Hui Deng , Dongxu Li , Yunshen Wei , Baohong Lv , Junjie Yan , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Hao Peng , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith , Lingpeng Kong

Recently, random feature attentions (RFAs) are proposed to approximate the softmax attention in linear time and space complexity by linearizing the exponential kernel. In this paper, we first propose a novel perspective to understand the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Chong Wang , Lingpeng Kong

Standard softmax self-attention excels in vision tasks but incurs quadratic complexity O(N^2), limiting high-resolution deployment. Linear attention reduces the cost to O(N), yet its compressed state representations can impair modeling…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ruibang Li , Guan Luo , Yiwei Zhang , Jin Gao , Bing Li , Weiming Hu

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) towards applications with ultra-long contexts faces challenges posed by the high computational and memory costs of the Transformer architecture. While existing sparse and linear attention…

Recently Transformers have provided state-of-the-art performance in sparse matching, crucial to realize high-performance 3D vision applications. Yet, these Transformers lack efficiency due to the quadratic computational complexity of their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Suwichaya Suwanwimolkul , Satoshi Komorita

Vision Transformers (ViTs) based vision foundation models (VFMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse vision tasks, but suffer from quadratic complexity that limits scalability to long sequences. Existing linear attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Yifan Li , Seunghyun Yoon , Viet Dac Lai , Franck Dernoncourt , Jason Kuen , Yu Kong , Trung Bui

We prove that with linear transformations, both (i) two-layer self-attention and (ii) one-layer self-attention followed by a softmax function are universal approximators for continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on compact domains. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Hude Liu , Hong-Yu Chen , Weimin Wu , Han Liu

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jusen Du , Jiaxi Hu , Tao Zhang , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

The quadratic computational complexity of softmax transformers has become a bottleneck in long-context scenarios. In contrast, linear attention model families provide a promising direction towards a more efficient sequential model. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Difan Deng , Andreas Bentzen Winje , Lukas Fehring , Marius Lindauer

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

Sequence models lie at the heart of modern deep learning. However, rapid advancements have produced a diversity of seemingly unrelated architectures, such as Transformers and recurrent alternatives. In this paper, we introduce a unifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Ke Alexander Wang , Jiaxin Shi , Emily B. Fox

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Linearization of attention using various kernel approximation and kernel learning techniques has shown promise. Past methods used a subset of combinations of component functions and weight matrices within the random feature paradigm. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Duke Nguyen , Du Yin , Aditya Joshi , Flora Salim

Sequence models face a fundamental tradeoff between memory capacity and computational efficiency. Transformers achieve expressive context modeling at quadratic cost, while linear attention and state-space models run in linear time by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yaxita Amin , Helen Zichen Li , Mengfan Zhang , Samet Ayhan

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing