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Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Jintao Zhang , Haoxu Wang , Kai Jiang , Kaiwen Zheng , Youhe Jiang , Ion Stoica , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Transformer-based models have made remarkable progress in image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer hinders its applicability to high-resolution images. Existing methods mitigate this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuang Ai , Huaibo Huang , Tao Wu , Qihang Fan , Ran He

We show the formal equivalence of linearised self-attention mechanisms and fast weight controllers from the early '90s, where a ``slow" neural net learns by gradient descent to program the ``fast weights" of another net through sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Imanol Schlag , Kazuki Irie , Jürgen Schmidhuber

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 introduce "talking-heads attention" - a variation on multi-head attention which includes linearprojections across the attention-heads dimension, immediately before and after the softmax operation.While inserting only a small number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Noam Shazeer , Zhenzhong Lan , Youlong Cheng , Nan Ding , Le Hou

Although deep convolutional neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performance across nearly all image classification tasks, their decisions are difficult to interpret. One approach that offers some level of interpretability by design is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Gamaleldin F. Elsayed , Simon Kornblith , Quoc V. Le

Although softmax attention drives state-of-the-art performance for sequence models, its quadratic complexity limits scalability, motivating linear alternatives such as state space models (SSMs). While these alternatives improve efficiency,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Rahel Rickenbach , Jelena Trisovic , Alexandre Didier , Jerome Sieber , Melanie N. Zeilinger

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…

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

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 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

Currently, lightweight hybrid backbone networks have partially alleviated the issue of computational saturation, but the imbalance in computational efficiencys between convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and attention mechanisms is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Fengyun Li , Chao Zheng , Yangyang Fang , Jialiang Lan , Jianhua Liang , Luhao Zhang , Fa Si

Attention architectures are widely used; they recently gained renewed popularity with Transformers yielding a streak of state of the art results. Yet, the geometrical implications of softmax-attention remain largely unexplored. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Previous research has explored the computational expressivity of Transformer models in simulating Boolean circuits or Turing machines. However, the learnability of these simulators from observational data has remained an open question. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Morris Yau , Ekin Akyürek , Jiayuan Mao , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Stefanie Jegelka , Jacob Andreas

There has been a rapid advance of custom hardware (HW) for accelerating the inference speed of deep neural networks (DNNs). Previously, the softmax layer was not a main concern of DNN accelerating HW, because its portion is relatively small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Ihor Vasyltsov , Wooseok Chang

Sequence modeling faces challenges in capturing long-range dependencies across diverse tasks. Recent linear and transformer-based forecasters have shown superior performance in time series forecasting. However, they are constrained by their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Bong Gyun Kang , Dongjun Lee , HyunGi Kim , DoHyun Chung , Sungroh Yoon

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in multi-image cross-modal retrieval, yet suffer from severe position bias, where predictions are dominated by input order rather than semantic relevance. Through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Mingtao Xian , Yifeng Yang , Qinying Gu , Xinbing Wang , Nanyang Ye

Recently, fully-connected and convolutional neural networks have been trained to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, natural language processing, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-24 Yichuan Tang

Attention mechanisms in deep learning architectures have often been used as a means of transparency and, as such, to shed light on the inner workings of the architectures. Recently, there has been a growing interest in whether or not this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of domains, but their quadratic attention mechanism poses significant challenges for long-sequence modelling. Recent efforts to design linear-time attention mechanisms have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Rares Dolga , Lucas Maystre , Marius Cobzarenco , David Barber