English
Related papers

Related papers: Top-Theta Attention: Sparsifying Transformers by C…

200 papers

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 computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Qirui Li , Guangcong Zheng , Qi Zhao , Jie Li , Bin Dong , Yiwu Yao , Xi Li

Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Chao Lou , Zixia Jia , Zilong Zheng , Kewei Tu

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

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Although Transformers have successfully transitioned from their language modelling origins to image-based applications, their quadratic computational complexity remains a challenge, particularly for dense prediction. In this paper we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Yutong Xie , Jianpeng Zhang , Yong Xia , Anton van den Hengel , Qi Wu

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Qianchao Zhu , Jiangfei Duan , Chang Chen , Siran Liu , Guanyu Feng , Xin Lv , Xiao Chuanfu , Dahua Lin , Chao Yang

Large language models spend most of their inference cost on attention over long contexts, yet empirical behavior suggests that only a small subset of tokens meaningfully contributes to each query. We formalize this phenomenon by modeling…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Vashista Nobaub

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across vision, language, and video. Yet, increasing task complexity has led to larger models and more tokens, raising the quadratic cost of self-attention and the overhead of GPU memory…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Joonmyung Choi , Sanghyeok Lee , Byungoh Ko , Eunseo Kim , Jihyung Kil , Hyunwoo J. Kim

We propose a novel method to sparsify attention in the Transformer model by learning to select the most-informative token representations during the training process, thus focusing on the task-specific parts of an input. A reduction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Michał Pietruszka , Łukasz Borchmann , Łukasz Garncarek

Many training-free sparse attention methods are effective for accelerating diffusion models. Recently, several works suggest that making sparse attention trainable can further increase sparsity while preserving generation quality. We study…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Jintao Zhang , Kai Jiang , Chendong Xiang , Weiqi Feng , Yuezhou Hu , Haocheng Xi , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu

The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Chendong Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Wen qi Wei , Xiaoyang Qu , Haoqian Wang , Jing Xiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-$k$…

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

The versatility of self-attention mechanism earned transformers great success in almost all data modalities, with limitations on the quadratic complexity and difficulty of training. Efficient transformers, on the other hand, often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Minh Lenhat , Viet Anh Nguyen , Khoa Nguyen , Duong Duc Hieu , Dao Huu Hung , Truong Son Hy

Softmax attention struggles with long contexts due to structural limitations: the strict sum-to-one constraint forces attention sinks on irrelevant tokens, and probability mass disperses as sequence lengths increase. We tackle these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Xingyue Huang , Xueying Ding , Mingxuan Ju , Yozen Liu , Neil Shah , Tong Zhao

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

Attention, specifically scaled dot-product attention, has proven effective for natural language, but it does not have a mechanism for handling hierarchical patterns of arbitrary nesting depth, which limits its ability to recognize certain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Brian DuSell , David Chiang

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

The Segment Anything Model (SAM) achieves strong open-vocabulary segmentation, but its ViT-based image encoders dominate inference latency and memory. Existing activation compression methods, such as token merging, reduce the token length…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Hoai-Chau Tran , Chi H. Nguyen , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Mathias Niepert , Fan Lai , Khoa D. Doan