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Despite several successes in document understanding, the practical task for long document understanding is largely under-explored due to several challenges in computation and how to efficiently absorb long multimodal input. Most current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Hai Pham , Guoxin Wang , Yijuan Lu , Dinei Florencio , Cha Zhang

Dot-product attention has wide applications in computer vision and natural language processing. However, its memory and computational costs grow quadratically with the input size. Such growth prohibits its application on high-resolution…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Zhuoran Shen , Mingyuan Zhang , Haiyu Zhao , Shuai Yi , Hongsheng Li

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

Softmax attention is the cornerstone of modern large language models, but its memory scales linearly and compute quadratically with sequence length. Linear recurrent models, such as linear attention and state space models, have become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kevin Y. Li , Asher Trockman , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Ziteng Sun

Linearizing pretrained large language models (LLMs) primarily relies on intra-layer hybrid attention mechanisms to alleviate the quadratic complexity of standard softmax attention. Existing methods perform token routing based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Weikang Meng , Liangyu Huo , Yadan Luo , Jiawen Guan , Jingyi Zhang , Yingjian Li , Zheng Zhang

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

Modern recommendation systems primarily rely on attention mechanisms with quadratic complexity, which limits their ability to handle long user sequences and slows down inference. While linear attention is a promising alternative, existing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Yufei Ye , Wei Guo , Hao Wang , Luankang Zhang , Heng Chang , Hong Zhu , Yuyang Ye , Yong Liu , Defu Lian , Enhong Chen

Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang

Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ruoxi Yu , Haotian Jiang , Jingpu Cheng , Penghao Yu , Qianxiao Li , Zhong Li

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…

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Haixu Wu , Jialong Wu , Jiehui Xu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

Linear transformers aim to reduce the quadratic space-time complexity of vanilla transformers. However, they usually suffer from degraded performances on various tasks and corpus. In this paper, we examine existing kernel-based linear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Zhen Qin , XiaoDong Han , Weixuan Sun , Dongxu Li , Lingpeng Kong , Nick Barnes , Yiran Zhong

Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Ruize He , Dongchen Han , Gao Huang

Medical images play an important role in clinical applications. Multimodal medical images could provide rich information about patients for physicians to diagnose. The image fusion technique is able to synthesize complementary information…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-12 Meng Zhou , Xiaolan Xu , Yuxuan Zhang

The primary aim of this manuscript is to underscore a significant limitation in current deep learning models, particularly vision models. Unlike human vision, which efficiently selects only the essential visual areas for further processing,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Ali Borji

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

While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuan Cao , Dong Wang

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

Scaling attention faces a critical bottleneck: the $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ quadratic computational cost of softmax attention, which limits its application in long-sequence domains. While linear attention mechanisms reduce this cost to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Ping He , Ali Abbasi , Yikun Bai , Xinran Liu , Elaheh Akbari , Darian Salehi , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

Attention mechanisms, especially self-attention, have played an increasingly important role in deep feature representation for visual tasks. Self-attention updates the feature at each position by computing a weighted sum of features using…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Meng-Hao Guo , Zheng-Ning Liu , Tai-Jiang Mu , Shi-Min Hu