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Related papers: Universal Approximation with Softmax Attention

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It is well known that Artificial Neural Networks are universal approximators. The classical result proves that, given a continuous function on a compact set on an n-dimensional space, then there exists a one-hidden-layer feedforward network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-23 Rocio Gonzalez-Diaz , Miguel A. Gutiérrez-Naranjo , Eduardo Paluzo-Hidalgo

This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms. We begin with a theoretical framework that enables the identification of the model's selective ability and the geometric separation involved in token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Timur Mudarisov , Mikhail Burtsev , Tatiana Petrova , Radu State

The capability of the self-attention mechanism to model the long-range dependencies has catapulted its deployment in vision models. Unlike convolution operators, self-attention offers infinite receptive field and enables compute-efficient…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Rajat Saini , Nandan Kumar Jha , Bedanta Das , Sparsh Mittal , C. Krishna Mohan

Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Ruize He , Dongchen Han , Gao Huang

The universal approximation theorem, in one of its most general versions, says that if we consider only continuous activation functions $\sigma$, then a standard feedforward neural network with one hidden layer is able to approximate any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Kai Fong Ernest Chong

Relative Positional Encoding (RPE), which encodes the relative distance between any pair of tokens, is one of the most successful modifications to the original Transformer. As far as we know, theoretical understanding of the RPE-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-31 Shengjie Luo , Shanda Li , Shuxin Zheng , Tie-Yan Liu , Liwei Wang , Di He

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chuanyang Zheng

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xinhao Yao , Hongjin Qian , Xiaolin Hu , Gengze Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Yong Liu

Feedforward neural networks have wide applicability in various disciplines of science due to their universal approximation property. Some authors have shown that single hidden layer feedforward neural networks (SLFNs) with fixed weights…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-01-04 Namig J. Guliyev , Vugar E. Ismailov

To improve the robustness of transformer neural networks used for temporal-dynamics prediction of chaotic systems, we propose a novel attention mechanism called easy attention which we demonstrate in time-series reconstruction and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Marcial Sanchis-Agudo , Yuning Wang , Roger Arnau , Luca Guastoni , Jasmin Lim , Karthik Duraisamy , Ricardo Vinuesa

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh

Transformers have demonstrated a competitive performance across a wide range of vision tasks, while it is very expensive to compute the global self-attention. Many methods limit the range of attention within a local window to reduce…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Zhenzhe Hechen , Wei Huang , Yixin Zhao

While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yining Li , Dongchen Han , Zeyu Liu , Hanyi Wang , Yulin Wang , Gao Huang

Self-attention models such as Transformers, which can capture temporal relationships without being limited by the distance between events, have given competitive speech recognition results. However, we note the range of the learned context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

Recently, Transformer networks have demonstrated outstanding performance in the field of image restoration due to the global receptive field and adaptability to input. However, the quadratic computational complexity of Softmax-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Zhi Jin , Yuwei Qiu , Kaihao Zhang , Hongdong Li , Wenhan Luo

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sahil Joshi , Agniva Chowdhury , Amar Kanakamedala , Ekam Singh , Evan Tu , Anshumali Shrivastava

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

We present a novel U-Attention vision Transformer for universal texture synthesis. We exploit the natural long-range dependencies enabled by the attention mechanism to allow our approach to synthesize diverse textures while preserving their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Shouchang Guo , Valentin Deschaintre , Douglas Noll , Arthur Roullier

Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Noah Amsel , Gilad Yehudai , Joan Bruna

Transformer-based video diffusion models (VDMs) deliver state-of-the-art video generation quality but are constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, making long sequences and high resolutions computationally expensive. While…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Mohsen Ghafoorian , Denis Korzhenkov , Amirhossein Habibian