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The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhenyi Shen , Junru Lu , Lin Gui , Jiazheng Li , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

We study the long-context limit of softmax self-attention with a fixed query and a random context of $n$ i.i.d. keys on the sphere, viewing the inverse temperature $\beta_n$ as the scaling parameter that decides whether attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Giuseppe Bruno , Shi Chen , Zhengjiang Lin , Yury Polyanskiy , Philippe Rigollet

Self-attention is a method of encoding sequences of vectors by relating these vectors to each-other based on pairwise similarities. These models have recently shown promising results for modeling discrete sequences, but they are non-trivial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Matthias Sperber , Jan Niehues , Graham Neubig , Sebastian Stüker , Alex Waibel

The computational burden of attention in long-context language models has motivated two largely independent lines of work: sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity by attending to selected tokens, and gated attention variants that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Alfred Shen , Aaron Shen

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays a key role in advancing human-computer interaction. Attention mechanisms have become the dominant approach for modeling emotional speech due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-17 Marc Casals-Salvador , Federico Costa , Rodolfo Zevallos , Javier Hernando

Token embeddings play a crucial role in language modeling but, despite this practical relevance, their theoretical understanding remains limited. Our paper addresses the gap by characterizing the structure of embeddings obtained via…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Diyuan Wu , Aleksandr Shevchenko , Samet Oymak , Marco Mondelli

Transformers and deep state space models (SSMs) sit at opposite ends of a basic design choice: attention routes each query through a growing key-value (KV) cache by content-based matching at quadratic cost, while deep SSMs compress context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Naoki Kiyohara , Harrison Bo Hua Zhu , Riccardo El Hassanin , Zhuo Sun , Wenlong Chen , Samir Bhatt , Yingzhen Li

Self-supervised pre-trained transformers have improved the state of the art on a variety of speech tasks. Due to the quadratic time and space complexity of self-attention, they usually operate at the level of relatively short (e.g.,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-30 Suwon Shon , Felix Wu , Kwangyoun Kim , Prashant Sridhar , Karen Livescu , Shinji Watanabe

Spiking Transformers, which combine the scalability of Transformers with the sparse, energy-efficient property of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), have achieved impressive results in neuromorphic and vision tasks and attracted increasing…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chenlin Zhou , Sihang Guo , Jiaqi Wang , Dongyang Ma , Kaiwei Che , Baiyu Chen , Qingyan Meng , Zhengyu Ma , Yonghong Tian

Self-attention in transformer models is an incremental associative memory that maps key vectors to value vectors. One way to speed up self-attention is to employ GPU-compatible vector search algorithms based on standard partitioning methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré , Gergely Szilvasy , Maria Lomeli , Francisco Massa , Naila Murray , Hervé Jégou , Matthijs Douze

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

Unneeded elements in the attention's context degrade performance. We introduce Selective Attention, a simple parameter-free change to the standard attention mechanism which reduces attention to unneeded elements. Selective attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Shuhai Zhang , Zhijie Qiu , Tingyu Wu , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Samet Oymak , Ankit Singh Rawat , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Christos Thrampoulidis

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

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Qiuwu Chen , Ying Sun , Shuhai Zhang , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

Transformers have demonstrated a competitive performance across a wide range of vision tasks, while it is very expensive to compute the global self-attention. Many methods limit the range of attention within a local window to reduce…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Zhenzhe Hechen , Wei Huang , Yixin Zhao