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Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

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

Attention mechanisms have been extensively employed in various applications, including time series modeling, owing to their capacity to capture intricate dependencies; however, their utility is often constrained by quadratic computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Mingtao Zhang , Guoli Yang , Zhanxing Zhu , Mengzhu Wang , Xiaoying Bai

Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yuhong Chou , Man Yao , Kexin Wang , Yuqi Pan , Ruijie Zhu , Yiran Zhong , Yu Qiao , Jibin Wu , Bo Xu , Guoqi Li

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Naoki Nishikawa , Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

Transformers have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. A common belief is their attention-based token mixer module contributes most to their competence. However, recent works show the attention-based module in Transformers can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Weihao Yu , Mi Luo , Pan Zhou , Chenyang Si , Yichen Zhou , Xinchao Wang , Jiashi Feng , Shuicheng Yan

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kewei Zhang , Ye Huang , Yufan Deng , Jincheng Yu , Junsong Chen , Huan Ling , Enze Xie , Daquan Zhou

Self-attention has become a defacto choice for capturing global context in various vision applications. However, its quadratic computational complexity with respect to image resolution limits its use in real-time applications, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Abdelrahman Shaker , Muhammad Maaz , Hanoona Rasheed , Salman Khan , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Fahad Shahbaz Khan

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

This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Weinuo Ou

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

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

Linear attentions have shown potential for improving Transformer efficiency, reducing attention's quadratic complexity to linear in sequence length. This holds exciting promise for (1) training linear Transformers from scratch, (2)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Michael Zhang , Kush Bhatia , Hermann Kumbong , Christopher Ré

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

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

Transformer-based models have gained large popularity and demonstrated promising results in long-term time-series forecasting in recent years. In addition to learning attention in time domain, recent works also explore learning attention in…

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

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

With the development of the self-attention mechanism, the Transformer model has demonstrated its outstanding performance in the computer vision domain. However, the massive computation brought from the full attention mechanism became a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Hai Lan , Xihao Wang , Xian Wei