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Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Naoki Nishikawa , Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

Recurrent neural network models with an attention mechanism have proven to be extremely effective on a wide variety of sequence-to-sequence problems. However, the fact that soft attention mechanisms perform a pass over the entire input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-03 Colin Raffel , Minh-Thang Luong , Peter J. Liu , Ron J. Weiss , Douglas Eck

Linear-attention models that compress the entire input sequence into a fixed-size recurrent state offer an efficient alternative to Transformers, but their finite memory induces forgetfulness that harms retrieval-intensive tasks. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Mutian He , Philip N. Garner

We show that every algorithm for testing $n$-variate Boolean functions for monotonicity must have query complexity $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/4})$. All previous lower bounds for this problem were designed for non-adaptive algorithms and, as a…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2015-11-17 Aleksandrs Belovs , Eric Blais

Human cognition typically involves thinking through abstract, fluid concepts rather than strictly using discrete linguistic tokens. Current reasoning models, however, are constrained to reasoning within the boundaries of human language,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Zhen Zhang , Xuehai He , Weixiang Yan , Ao Shen , Chenyang Zhao , Shuohang Wang , Yelong Shen , Xin Eric Wang

Quantum computations promise the ability to solve problems intractable in the classical setting. Restricting the types of computations considered often allows to establish a provable theoretical advantage by quantum computations, and later…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-11-19 Dmitri Maslov , Jin-Sung Kim , Sergey Bravyi , Theodore J. Yoder , Sarah Sheldon

We show that there is a randomized algorithm that, when given a small constant-depth Boolean circuit $C$ made up of gates that compute constant-degree Polynomial Threshold functions or PTFs (i.e., Boolean functions that compute signs of…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Swapnam Bajpai , Vaibhav Krishan , Deepanshu Kush , Nutan Limaye , Srikanth Srinivasan

Large language models (LLMs) have brought significant and transformative changes in human society. These models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, leading to various advancements and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-06 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Shenghao Xie

The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Chendong Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Wen qi Wei , Xiaoyang Qu , Haoqian Wang , Jing Xiao

Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice. We bridge this gap by analyzing standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Moritz Brösamle , Stephan Eckstein

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 Transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern deep learning, yet its core self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic computational complexity and lacks grounding in biological neural computation. We propose Selective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hasi Hays

We study a natural complexity measure of Boolean functions known as the rational degree. Denoted $\textrm{rdeg}(f)$, it is the minimal degree of a rational function that is equal to $f$ on the Boolean hypercube. For total functions $f$, it…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Vishnu Iyer , Siddhartha Jain , Robin Kothari , Matt Kovacs-Deak , Vinayak M. Kumar , Luke Schaeffer , Daochen Wang , Michael Whitmeyer

We propose a learning approach for turn-level spoken language understanding, which facilitates a user to speak one or more utterances compositionally in a turn for completing a task (e.g., voice ordering). A typical pipelined approach for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Hao Lang , Wen Wang

Attention is a core operation in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We present BD Attention (BDA), the first lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention. BDA is enabled by a simple matrix identity from Basis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jialin Zhao

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

We introduce Performers, Transformer architectures which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on…

Token-level attention tuning, a class of training-free methods including Post-hoc Attention Steering (PASTA) and Attention Calibration (ACT), has emerged as a promising approach for improving frozen LLMs via interpretable interventions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Feijiang Han , Xiaodong Yu , Jianheng Tang , Delip Rao , Weihua Du , Lyle Ungar

We develop a method for training neural networks on Boolean data in which the values at all nodes are strictly $\pm 1$, and the resulting models are typically equivalent to networks whose nonzero weights are also $\pm 1$. The method…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Veit Elser , Manish Krishan Lal

This paper depicts algorithms for solving the decision Boolean Satisfiability Problem. An extreme problem is formulated to analyze the complexity of algorithms and the complexity for solving it. A novel and easy reformulation as a lottery…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2016-04-15 Carlos Barrón-Romero