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Self-attention in Transformers relies on globally normalized softmax weights, causing all tokens to compete for influence at every layer. When composed across depth, this interaction pattern induces strong synchronization dynamics that…
Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…
The dot product self-attention is known to be central and indispensable to state-of-the-art Transformer models. But is it really required? This paper investigates the true importance and contribution of the dot product-based self-attention…
Attention is sparse in vision transformers. We observe the final prediction in vision transformers is only based on a subset of most informative tokens, which is sufficient for accurate image recognition. Based on this observation, we…
Transformers excel across domains, yet their quadratic attention complexity poses a barrier to scaling. Random-feature attention, as in Performers, can reduce this cost to linear in the sequence length by approximating the softmax kernel…
The quadratic time and memory complexity inherent to self-attention mechanisms, with respect to sequence length, presents a critical computational bottleneck in the training and deployment of large-scale Transformer-based language models.…
The computational cost of softmax-based attention in transformers limits their applicability to long-context tasks. Adaptive sparsity, of which $\alpha$-entmax attention is an example, offers a flexible data-dependent alternative, but…
We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…
Data accesses between on- and off-chip memories account for a large fraction of overall energy consumption during inference with deep learning networks. We present APack, a simple and effective, lossless, off-chip memory compression…
Despite achieving state-of-the-art results in nearly all Natural Language Processing applications, fine-tuning Transformer-based language models still requires a significant amount of labeled data to work. A well known technique to reduce…
As its core computation, a self-attention mechanism gauges pairwise correlations across the entire input sequence. Despite favorable performance, calculating pairwise correlations is prohibitively costly. While recent work has shown the…
We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…
The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…
Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…
Compressed Neural Networks have the potential to enable deep learning across new applications and smaller computational environments. However, understanding the range of learning tasks in which such models can succeed is not well studied.…
Attention-based transformers have become the standard architecture in many deep learning fields, primarily due to their ability to model long-range dependencies and handle variable-length input sequences. However, the attention mechanism…
Efficient inference on GPUs using large language models remains challenging due to memory bandwidth limitations, particularly during data transfers between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM in attention computations. Approximate…
Pretraining optimizers are tuned to produce the strongest possible base model, on the assumption that a stronger starting point yields a stronger model after subsequent changes like post-training and quantization. This overlooks the…
Efficiently deploying deep neural networks on low-resource edge devices is challenging due to their ever-increasing resource requirements. To address this issue, researchers have proposed multiplication-free neural networks, such as…
Transformers have achieved widespread and remarkable success, while the computational complexity of their attention modules remains a major bottleneck for vision tasks. Existing methods mainly employ 8-bit or 4-bit quantization to balance…