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To address the high resolution of image pixels, the Swin Transformer introduces window attention. This mechanism divides an image into non-overlapping windows and restricts attention computation to within each window, significantly…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Zhendong Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Qianchao Zhu , Jiangfei Duan , Chang Chen , Siran Liu , Guanyu Feng , Xin Lv , Xiao Chuanfu , Dahua Lin , Chao Yang

Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. While FlashAttention-3 optimized attention for Hopper GPUs through asynchronous execution and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ted Zadouri , Markus Hoehnerbach , Jay Shah , Timmy Liu , Vijay Thakkar , Tri Dao

Achieving reliable 4-bit attention is a prerequisite for end-to-end FP4 computation on emerging FP4-capable GPUs, yet attention remains the main obstacle due to FP4's tiny dynamic range and attention's heavy-tailed activations. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Peiyuan Zhang , Matthew Noto , Wenxuan Tan , Chengquan Jiang , Will Lin , Wei Zhou , Hao Zhang

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zihan Qiu , Zekun Wang , Bo Zheng , Zeyu Huang , Kaiyue Wen , Songlin Yang , Rui Men , Le Yu , Fei Huang , Suozhi Huang , Dayiheng Liu , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Jintao Zhang , Haoxu Wang , Kai Jiang , Kaiwen Zheng , Youhe Jiang , Ion Stoica , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Transformer are widely used in various fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. However, the training time for large Transformer models can be challenging due to the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism. Especially as…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Youxuan Xu , Tong Wu , Shigang Li , Xueying Wang , Jingjing Wang

Diffusion transformer-based video generation models (DiTs) have recently attracted widespread attention for their excellent generation quality. However, their computational cost remains a major bottleneck-attention alone accounts for over…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Xuan Shen , Chenxia Han , Yufa Zhou , Yanyue Xie , Yifan Gong , Quanyi Wang , Yiwei Wang , Yanzhi Wang , Pu Zhao , Jiuxiang Gu

At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fanqi Yan , Huy Nguyen , Pedram Akbarian , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

FlashAttention (Dao, 2023) effectively reduces the quadratic peak memory usage to linear in training transformer-based large language models (LLMs) on a single GPU. In this paper, we introduce DISTFLASHATTN, a distributed memory-efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Dacheng Li , Rulin Shao , Anze Xie , Eric P. Xing , Xuezhe Ma , Ion Stoica , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Hao Zhang

Self-attention is at the heart of the popular Transformer architecture, yet suffers from quadratic time and memory complexity. The breakthrough FlashAttention algorithm revealed I/O complexity as the true bottleneck in scaling Transformers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Barna Saha , Christopher Ye

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Sung Ju Hwang

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

Sparse attention, which selectively attends to a subset of tokens in the context was supposed to be efficient. However, its theoretical reduction in FLOPs has rarely translated into wall-clock speed-up over its dense attention counterparts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Xihui Lin , Yunan Zhang , Suyu Ge , Liliang Ren , Barun Patra , Vishrav Chaudhary , Hao Peng , Xia Song

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Qirui Li , Guangcong Zheng , Qi Zhao , Jie Li , Bin Dong , Yiwu Yao , Xi Li

Large language model inference on Central Processing Units (CPU) is challenging due to the vast quantities of expensive Multiply-Add (MAD) matrix operations in the attention computations. In this paper, we argue that there is a rare gem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Tianyi Zhang , Jonah Wonkyu Yi , Bowen Yao , Zhaozhuo Xu , Anshumali Shrivastava

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-28 Songlin Yang , Bailin Wang , Yikang Shen , Rameswar Panda , Yoon Kim

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…