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The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in popular transformer architectures poses significant challenges for training and inference, and becomes the bottleneck for long inputs. Is it possible to significantly reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yingyu Liang , Zhizhou Sha , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yufa Zhou

It is widely accepted from transformer research that "attention is all we need", but the amount of attention required has never been systematically quantified. Is quadratic $O(L^2)$ attention necessary, or is there a sub-quadratic attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yufeng Huang

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Transformers are slow and memory-hungry on long sequences, since the time and memory complexity of self-attention are quadratic in sequence length. Approximate attention methods have attempted to address this problem by trading off model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Tri Dao , Daniel Y. Fu , Stefano Ermon , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

In the \textsc{Maximum Degree Contraction} problem, input is a graph $G$ on $n$ vertices, and integers $k, d$, and the objective is to check whether $G$ can be transformed into a graph of maximum degree at most $d$, using at most $k$ edge…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Saket Saurabh , Prafullkumar Tale

Attention with bias, which extends standard attention by introducing prior knowledge as an additive bias matrix to the query-key scores, has been widely deployed in vision, language, protein-folding and other advanced scientific models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Haixu Wu , Minghao Guo , Yuezhou Ma , Yuanxu Sun , Jianmin Wang , Wojciech Matusik , Mingsheng Long

The attention operator remains a critical performance bottleneck in large language models (LLMs), particularly for long-context scenarios. While FlashAttention is the most widely used and effective GPU-aware acceleration algorithm, it must…

Low-bit quantization of network weights and activations can drastically reduce the memory footprint, complexity, energy consumption and latency of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, low-bit quantization can also cause a considerable drop…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-25 Ghouthi Boukli Hacene , Lukas Mauch , Stefan Uhlich , Fabien Cardinaux

The most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) models today are Transformers employing self-attention. In its standard form, self-attention incurs costs that increase with context length, driving demand for storage, compute, and energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Franz A. Heinsen , Leo Kozachkov

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

Soft attention is a critical mechanism powering LLMs to locate relevant parts within a given context. However, individual attention weights are determined by the similarity of only a single query and key token vector. This "single token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Olga Golovneva , Tianlu Wang , Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

Recent advances in diffusion models have enabled high-quality video generation, but the additional temporal dimension significantly increases computational costs, making training and inference on long videos prohibitively expensive. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Xingyang Li , Muyang Li , Tianle Cai , Haocheng Xi , Shuo Yang , Yujun Lin , Lvmin Zhang , Songlin Yang , Jinbo Hu , Kelly Peng , Maneesh Agrawala , Ion Stoica , Kurt Keutzer , Song Han

Inclusion-based (i.e., Andersen-style) points-to analysis is a fundamental static analysis problem. The seminal work of Andersen gave a worst-case cubic $O(n^3)$ time points-to analysis algorithm for C, where $n$ is proportional to the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-01-05 Qirun Zhang

Transformer architectures are now central to sequence modeling tasks. At its heart is the attention mechanism, which enables effective modeling of long-term dependencies in a sequence. Recently, transformers have been successfully applied…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Huijie Pan , Lingpeng Kong

Training causal transformers at extreme sequence lengths is bottlenecked by the quadratic time and memory of scaled dot-product attention (SDPA). In this work, we propose Lighthouse Attention, a training-only symmetrical selection-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Bowen Peng , Subho Ghosh , Jeffrey Quesnelle

Recently, there has been a surge of interest for quantum computation for its ability to exponentially speed up algorithms, including machine learning algorithms. However, Tang suggested that the exponential speed up can also be done on a…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2020-12-03 Daniel Chen , Yekun Xu , Betis Baheri , Samuel A. Stein , Chuan Bi , Ying Mao , Qiang Quan , Shuai Xu

Attention based Transformer architecture has enabled significant advances in the field of natural language processing. In addition to new pre-training techniques, recent improvements crucially rely on working with a relatively larger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Transformer-based scientific foundation models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, but current architectures give deterministic outputs and provide limited support for calibrated predictive uncertainty. We propose Stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Akash Yadav , Taiwo A. Adebiyi , Ruda Zhang

Multimodal Transformers serve as the backbone for state-of-the-art vision-language models, yet their quadratic attention complexity remains a critical barrier to scalability. In this work, we investigate the viability of Linear Attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Armin Gerami , Seyedehanita Madani , Ramani Duraiswami