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Large language models (LLMs) exhibit a wide range of capabilities, including mathematical reasoning, code generation, and linguistic behaviors. We show that many capabilities are highly localized to small subsets of attention heads within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Anna Bair , Yixuan Even Xu , Mingjie Sun , J. Zico Kolter

Self-attention serves as the core foundation of large-scale transformer pretraining, but its quadratic token interaction cost makes inference expensive. Replacing attention with simpler sequential modules is appealing, yet naive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yuxin Ren , Maxwell D Collins , Miao Hu , Huanrui Yang

Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Weilin Zhao , Zihan Zhou , Zhou Su , Chaojun Xiao , Yuxuan Li , Yanghao Li , Yudi Zhang , Weilun Zhao , Zhen Li , Yuxiang Huang , Ao Sun , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu

Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Sinong Wang , Belinda Z. Li , Madian Khabsa , Han Fang , Hao Ma

Chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning performance of large language models (LLM). While current theoretical studies often attribute this improvement to increased expressiveness and computational capacity, we argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Kaiyue Wen , Huaqing Zhang , Hongzhou Lin , Jingzhao Zhang

Fully finetuning foundation language models (LMs) with billions of parameters is often impractical due to high computational costs, memory requirements, and the risk of overfitting. Although methods like low-rank adapters help address these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jonathan Svirsky , Yehonathan Refael , Ofir Lindenbaum

While sparse attention mitigates the computational bottleneck of long-context LLM training, its distributed training process exhibits extreme heterogeneity in both \textit{1)} sequence length and \textit{2)} sparsity sensitivity, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Hongtao Xu , Jianchao Tan , Yuxuan Hu , Pengju Lu , Hongyu Wang , Pingwei Sun , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Mingzhen Li , Weile Jia

Most state-of-the-art techniques for Language Models (LMs) today rely on transformer-based architectures and their ubiquitous attention mechanism. However, the exponential growth in computational requirements with longer input sequences…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Venkatapathy Subramanian , Natwar Modani , Ganesh Ramakrishnan

Recent work on Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has revealed striking limits in their working memory capacity, similar to what has been found in human behavioral studies. Specifically, these models' performance drops…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Dongyu Gong , Hantao Zhang

Recently, inspired by the concept of sparsity, Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have gained increasing popularity for scaling model size while keeping the number of activated parameters constant. In this study, we thoroughly investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Xiaoye Qu , Daize Dong , Xuyang Hu , Tong Zhu , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhengyu Tian , Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar , Hemant Krishnakumar , Reza Rawassizadeh

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in the field of long-context modeling, however, their inference computational costs have become a critical bottleneck hindering the advancement of tasks such as agents and multimodal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Di Xiu , Hongyin Tang , Bolin Rong , Lizhi Yan , Jingang Wang , Yifan Lu , Xunliang Cai

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jifeng Song , Kai Huang , Xiangyu Yin , Boyuan Yang , Wei Gao

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Language models (LMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. We propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Mansi Sakarvadia

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Prajwal Singhania , Siddharth Singh , Shwai He , Soheil Feizi , Abhinav Bhatele

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have demonstrated their effectiveness for a broad range of information retrieval and natural language processing tasks. As the core part of PLM, multi-head self-attention is appealing for its ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Shanshan Wang , Zhumin Chen , Zhaochun Ren , Huasheng Liang , Qiang Yan , Pengjie Ren

In recent years, pre-trained large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in achieving an inference-time few-shot learning capability known as in-context learning. However, existing literature has highlighted the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Xinyi Wang , Wanrong Zhu , Michael Saxon , Mark Steyvers , William Yang Wang

The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge is particularly acute for emerging agentic applications that require processing multi-million…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ceyu Xu , Jiangnan Yu , Yongji Wu , Yuan Xie

Model sparsification in deep learning promotes simpler, more interpretable models with fewer parameters. This not only reduces the model's memory footprint and computational needs but also shortens inference time. This work focuses on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Richa Upadhyay , Ronald Phlypo , Rajkumar Saini , Marcus Liwicki

Large language models (LLMs) now support context windows of hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, enabling applications such as long-document summarization, large-scale code synthesis, multi-document question answering and persistent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Siyuan Yan , Guo-Qing Jiang , Yuchen Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Ran Zhu , Chun Cao , Jingwei Xu