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Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

We propose a novel attention mechanism, named Cog Attention, that enables attention weights to be negative for enhanced expressiveness, which stems from two key factors: (1) Cog Attention enhances parameter flexibility. For example, unlike…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Ang Lv , Ruobing Xie , Shuaipeng Li , Jiayi Liao , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang , Di Wang , Rui Yan

The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Shawn Tan , Songlin Yang , Aaron Courville , Rameswar Panda , Yikang Shen

The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Firas Khader , Omar S. M. El Nahhas , Tianyu Han , Gustav Müller-Franzes , Sven Nebelung , Jakob Nikolas Kather , Daniel Truhn

Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Aurko Roy , Mohammad Saffar , Ashish Vaswani , David Grangier

The self-attention mechanism has significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, facilitating the development of advanced language-learning machines. Although its utility is widely acknowledged, the precise mechanisms of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Tal Halevi , Yarden Tzach , Ronit D. Gross , Shalom Rosner , Ido Kanter

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

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

The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Etienne Boursier , Claire Boyer

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko

Transformer networks are able to capture patterns in data coming from many domains (text, images, videos, proteins, etc.) with little or no change to architecture components. We perform a theoretical analysis of the core component…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Valerii Likhosherstov , Krzysztof Choromanski , Adrian Weller

The Transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern deep learning, yet its core self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic computational complexity and lacks grounding in biological neural computation. We propose Selective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hasi Hays

This work presents a sparse-attention Transformer architecture for modeling documents that contain large tables. Tables are ubiquitous on the web, and are rich in information. However, more than 20% of relational tables on the web have 20…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Julian Martin Eisenschlos , Maharshi Gor , Thomas Müller , William W. Cohen

Transformer-based architectures traditionally employ softmax to compute attention weights, which produces dense distributions over all tokens in a sequence. While effective in many settings, this density has been shown to be detrimental for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Pavlo Vasylenko , Hugo Pitorro , André F. T. Martins , Marcos Treviso

Transformer architectures have led to remarkable progress in many state-of-art applications. However, despite their successes, modern transformers rely on the self-attention mechanism, whose time- and space-complexity is quadratic in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Feyza Duman Keles , Pruthuvi Mahesakya Wijewardena , Chinmay Hegde

To overcome the quadratic cost of self-attention, recent works have proposed various sparse attention modules, most of which fall under one of two groups: 1) sparse attention under a hand-crafted patterns and 2) full attention followed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Sungjun Cho , Seonwoo Min , Jinwoo Kim , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Seunghoon Hong