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Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N^2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Guanghui Qin , Yukun Feng , Benjamin Van Durme

Recently, several studies reported that dot-product selfattention (SA) may not be indispensable to the state-of-theart Transformer models. Motivated by the fact that dense synthesizer attention (DSA), which dispenses with dot products and…

Sound · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Menglong Xu , Shengqiang Li , Xiao-Lei Zhang

Transformer-based large language models face severe scalability challenges in long-context generation due to the computational and memory costs of full-context attention. Under practical computation and memory constraints, many…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xianpeng Shang , Jiang Li , Zehua Duo , Qianyi Cai , Xiangdong Su

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Zhenhai Zhu , Radu Soricut

The quadratic complexity of attention imposes severe memory and computational bottlenecks on Large Language Model (LLM) inference. This challenge is particularly acute for emerging agentic applications that require processing multi-million…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ceyu Xu , Jiangnan Yu , Yongji Wu , Yuan Xie

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingkun Liu , Yisong Yue , Max Welling , Yue Song

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

Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Liu Liu , Zheng Qu , Zhaodong Chen , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

Self-attention serves as the core foundation of large-scale transformer pretraining, but its quadratic token interaction cost makes inference expensive. Replacing attention with simpler sequential modules is appealing, yet naive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Yuxin Ren , Maxwell D Collins , Miao Hu , Huanrui Yang

Transformers have emerged as a powerful tool for a broad range of natural language processing tasks. A key component that drives the impressive performance of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism that encodes the influence or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yunyang Xiong , Zhanpeng Zeng , Rudrasis Chakraborty , Mingxing Tan , Glenn Fung , Yin Li , Vikas Singh

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

Transformer architectures, and their attention mechanisms in particular, form the foundation of modern large language models. While transformer models are widely believed to operate in high-dimensional hidden spaces, we show that attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Junxuan Wang , Xuyang Ge , Wentao Shu , Zhengfu He , Xipeng Qiu

While the Transformer architecture dominates many fields, its quadratic self-attention complexity hinders its use in large-scale applications. Linear attention offers an efficient alternative, but its direct application often degrades…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Kewei Zhang , Ye Huang , Yufan Deng , Jincheng Yu , Junsong Chen , Huan Ling , Enze Xie , Daquan Zhou

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across multiple NLP tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism complexity scales quadratically with the sequence length, creating an obstacle for tasks involving long sequences, like in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Belen Alastruey , Javier Ferrando , Gerard I. Gállego , Marta R. Costa-jussà

In mechanistic interpretability, recent work scrutinizes transformer "circuits" - sparse, mono or multi layer sub computations, that may reflect human understandable functions. Yet, these network circuits are rarely acid-tested for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Karan Bali , Jack Stanley , Praneet Suresh , Danilo Bzdok

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

Recently, Transformers have shown promising performance in various vision tasks. To reduce the quadratic computation complexity caused by the global self-attention, various methods constrain the range of attention within a local region to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Sitong Wu , Tianyi Wu , Haoru Tan , Guodong Guo

End-to-end Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are made increasingly large and complex to achieve the state-ofthe-art accuracy. However, the increased complexity of a model can also introduce high risk of over-fitting, which is a…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-08-14 Xueli Jia , Jianzong Wang , Zhiyong Zhang , Ning Cheng , Jing Xiao

The transformer architecture has driven breakthroughs in recent years on tasks which require modeling pairwise relationships between sequential elements, as is the case in natural language understanding. However, long seqeuences pose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Heejun Lee , Jina Kim , Jeffrey Willette , Sung Ju Hwang

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann