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Although Transformers with fully connected self-attentions are powerful to model long-term dependencies, they are struggling to scale to long texts with thousands of words in language modeling. One of the solutions is to equip the model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-27 Haozhe Ji , Rongsheng Zhang , Zhenyu Yang , Zhipeng Hu , Minlie Huang

The Transformer architecture is widely deployed in many popular and impactful Large Language Models. At its core is the attention mechanism for calculating correlations between pairs of tokens. Performing an attention computation takes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Josh Alman , Hantao Yu

Effective representation learning from text has been an active area of research in the fields of NLP and text mining. Attention mechanisms have been at the forefront in order to learn contextual sentence representations. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Sneha Mehta , Huzefa Rangwala , Naren Ramakrishnan

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Pre-trained language models demonstrate general intelligence and common sense, but long inputs quickly become a bottleneck for memorizing information at inference time. We resurface a simple method, Memorizing Transformers (Wu et al.,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Phoebe Klett , Thomas Ahle

This work introduces a novel Retention Layer mechanism for Transformer based architectures, addressing their inherent lack of intrinsic retention capabilities. Unlike human cognition, which can encode and dynamically recall symbolic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 M. Murat Yaslioglu

Transformers have transformed the field of natural language processing. This performance is largely attributed to the use of stacked self-attention layers, each of which consists of matrix multiplies as well as softmax operations. As a…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Jacob R. Stevens , Rangharajan Venkatesan , Steve Dai , Brucek Khailany , Anand Raghunathan

The attention mechanism has been the core component in modern transformer architectures. However, the computation of standard full attention scales quadratically with the sequence length, serving as a major bottleneck in long-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yusheng Zhao , Hourun Li , Bohan Wu , Yichun Yin , Lifeng Shang , Jingyang Yuan , Meng Zhang , Ming Zhang

Slim attention shrinks the context memory size by 2x for transformer models with MHA (multi-head attention), which can speed up inference by up to 2x for large context windows. Slim attention is an exact, mathematically identical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Nils Graef , Andrew Wasielewski

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. FlashAttention elaborated an approach to speed up attention on GPUs through minimizing memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Jay Shah , Ganesh Bikshandi , Ying Zhang , Vijay Thakkar , Pradeep Ramani , Tri Dao

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

Recurrent-attention hybrids aim to combine the efficiency of recurrence with the expressivity of attention, but existing approaches typically apply attention uniformly across all positions, even when the recurrent state alone is sufficient…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Haoran Zheng , Chen Shani

The transformer architecture predominates across various models. As the heart of the transformer, attention has a computational complexity of $O(N^2)$, compared to $O(N)$ for linear transformations. When handling large sequence lengths,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Jintao Zhang , Jia Wei , Haofeng Huang , Pengle Zhang , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

The transformer model is known to be computationally demanding, and prohibitively costly for long sequences, as the self-attention module uses a quadratic time and space complexity with respect to sequence length. Many researchers have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ziwei He , Meng Yang , Minwei Feng , Jingcheng Yin , Xinbing Wang , Jingwen Leng , Zhouhan Lin

Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Chayne Thrash , Yikun Bai , Keaton Hamm , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

The state-of-the-art speech enhancement has limited performance in speech estimation accuracy. Recently, in deep learning, the Transformer shows the potential to exploit the long-range dependency in speech by self-attention. Therefore, it…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Yi Li , Yang Sun , Syed Mohsen Naqvi

Sequential information contains short- to long-range dependencies; however, learning long-timescale information has been a challenge for recurrent neural networks. Despite improvements in long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Hsiang-Yun Sherry Chien , Javier S. Turek , Nicole Beckage , Vy A. Vo , Christopher J. Honey , Ted L. Willke

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