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Related papers: Universal Approximation with Softmax Attention

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Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Venmugil Elango

Vision Transformers have achieved impressive performance in video classification, while suffering from the quadratic complexity caused by the Softmax attention mechanism. Some studies alleviate the computational costs by reducing the number…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Kaiyue Lu , Zexiang Liu , Jianyuan Wang , Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Hui Deng , Xiaodong Han , Yuchao Dai , Yiran Zhong

A variety of attention mechanisms have been studied to improve the performance of various computer vision tasks. However, the prior methods overlooked the significance of retaining the information on both channel and spatial aspects to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Yichao Liu , Zongru Shao , Nico Hoffmann

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

Transformer is an attention-based neural network, which consists of two sublayers, namely, Self-Attention Network (SAN) and Feed-Forward Network (FFN). Existing research explores to enhance the two sublayers separately to improve the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Zhihao Fan , Yeyun Gong , Dayiheng Liu , Zhongyu Wei , Siyuan Wang , Jian Jiao , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fanqi Yan , Huy Nguyen , Pedram Akbarian , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

While Transformer networks benefit from a global receptive field, their quadratic cost relative to sequence length restricts their application to long sequences and high-resolution inputs. We introduce Fast Multipole Attention (FMA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yanming Kang , Giang Tran , Hans De Sterck

Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Jiaxu Liu , Yuhe Bai , Xiangyu Yin , Christos-Savvas Bouganis

The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Ran He

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Ivan Kobyzev , Abbas Ghaddar , Dingtao Hu , Boxing Chen

We study the problem of learning Transformer-based sequence models with black-box access to their outputs. In this setting, a learner may adaptively query the oracle with any sequence of vectors and observe the output of the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kulin Shah , Michael Hahn , Varun Kanade

Attention-based transformer networks have demonstrated promising potential as their applications extend from natural language processing to vision. However, despite the recent improvements, such as sub-quadratic attention approximation and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-05 Lingchuan Meng

Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of softmax attention remains a central bottleneck that limits their scalability. Alman and Song (NeurIPS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Vladimir Braverman , Junze Yin , Haochen Zhang

Learning representations on large graphs is a long-standing challenge due to the inter-dependence nature. Transformers recently have shown promising performance on small graphs thanks to its global attention for capturing all-pair…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Qitian Wu , Kai Yang , Hengrui Zhang , David Wipf , Junchi Yan

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chen Zhu , Wei Ping , Chaowei Xiao , Mohammad Shoeybi , Tom Goldstein , Anima Anandkumar , Bryan Catanzaro

Transformer is a powerful tool for many natural language tasks which is based on self-attention, a mechanism that encodes the dependence of other tokens on each specific token, but the computation of self-attention is a bottleneck due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Madhusudan Verma