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The quadratic cost of attention limits the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially under limited hardware memory budgets. While attention is often sparse, existing static sparse methods cannot adapt to task- or input-dependent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siheng Xiong , Joe Zou , Faramarz Fekri , Yae Jee Cho

Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yu Chen , Runkai Chen , Sheng Yi , Xinda Zhao , Xiaohong Li , Jianjin Zhang , Jun Sun , Chuanrui Hu , Yunyun Han , Lidong Bing , Yafeng Deng , Tianqiao Chen

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) deliver strong long-context processing capability in a non-autoregressive decoding paradigm. However, the considerable computational cost of bidirectional full attention limits the inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lingkun Long , Yushi Huang , Shihao Bai , Ruihao Gong , Jun Zhang , Ao Zhou , Jianlei Yang

From natural language processing to vision, Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of most modern deep learning applications. Unfortunately, its memory and computational requirements can be prohibitive in low-resource settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Peyman Hosseini , Mehran Hosseini , Ignacio Castro , Matthew Purver

The computational challenges of Large Language Model (LLM) inference remain a significant barrier to their widespread deployment, especially as prompt lengths continue to increase. Due to the quadratic complexity of the attention…

Scaling autoregressive large language models (LLMs) has driven unprecedented progress but comes with vast computational costs. In this work, we tackle these costs by leveraging unstructured sparsity within an LLM's feedforward layers, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Edoardo Cetin , Stefano Peluchetti , Emilio Castillo , Akira Naruse , Mana Murakami , Llion Jones

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

We propose Sparse Sinkhorn Attention, a new efficient and sparse method for learning to attend. Our method is based on differentiable sorting of internal representations. Concretely, we introduce a meta sorting network that learns to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Yi Tay , Dara Bahri , Liu Yang , Donald Metzler , Da-Cheng Juan

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet their standard attention mechanism incurs quadratic computation and memory costs with respect to sequence length, posing a major bottleneck for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Tao Bu , Qiangang Wang , Bowen Zeng , Hanwen Sun , Yunpeng Huang , Chun Cao , Jingwei Xu

Long-Context Transformer Models (LCTMs) are vital for real-world applications but suffer high computational costs due to attention's quadratic complexity. Block-sparse attention mitigates this by focusing computation on critical regions,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Ruyi Xu , Guangxuan Xiao , Haofeng Huang , Junxian Guo , Song Han

Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, yet transformers struggle with efficiency due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Sparse attention methods alleviate this cost but often impose static, predefined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Hanzhi Zhang , Heng Fan , Kewei Sha , Yan Huang , Yunhe Feng

Transformer architecture has been very successful long runner in the field of Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLM) because of its powerful attention-based learning and parallel-natured architecture. As the models grow gigantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Phani Kumar , Nyshadham , Jyothendra Varma , Polisetty V R K , Aditya Rathore

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 per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Luke McDermott , Robert W. Heath , Rahul Parhi

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chunyuan Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Yuanyuan Xu , Jiarui Liu , T. S. Eugene Ng , Hanjie Chen

Large vision-language models (VLMs) enable joint processing of text and images. However, incorporating vision data significantly increases the prompt length, resulting in a longer time to first token (TTFT). This bottleneck can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Tharun Adithya Srikrishnan , Deval Shah , Timothy Hein , Ahmed Hasssan , Stephen Youn , Steven K. Reinhardt

This study introduces bifurcated attention, a method designed to enhance language model inference in shared-context batch decoding scenarios. Our approach addresses the challenge of redundant memory IO costs, a critical factor contributing…

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yizhao Gao , Zhichen Zeng , Dayou Du , Shijie Cao , Peiyuan Zhou , Jiaxing Qi , Junjie Lai , Hayden Kwok-Hay So , Ting Cao , Fan Yang , Mao Yang

Communication-efficient distributed training algorithms have received considerable interest recently due to their benefits for training Large Language Models (LLMs) in bandwidth-constrained settings, such as across datacenters and over the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Amir Sarfi , Benjamin Thérien , Joel Lidin , Eugene Belilovsky