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Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Chao Lou , Zixia Jia , Zilong Zheng , Kewei Tu

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Piotr Nawrot , Robert Li , Renjie Huang , Sebastian Ruder , Kelly Marchisio , Edoardo M. Ponti

Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

The observation that activation sparsity emerges in MLP blocks of standardly trained Transformers offers an opportunity to drastically reduce computation costs without sacrificing performance. To theoretically explain this phenomenon,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ze Peng , Jian Zhang , Lei Qi , Yang Gao , Yinghuan Shi

The quadratic computational cost of the self-attention mechanism is a primary challenge in scaling Transformer models. While attention sparsity is widely studied as a technique to improve computational efficiency, it is almost universally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sagar Gandhi , Vishal Gandhi

Transformer models can face practical limitations due to their high computational requirements. At the same time, such models exhibit significant activation sparsity, which can be leveraged to reduce the inference cost by converting parts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Filip Szatkowski , Bartosz Wójcik , Mikołaj Piórczyński , Simone Scardapane

Trainings of Large Language Models are generally bottlenecked by matrix multiplications. In the Transformer architecture, a large portion of these operations happens in the Feed Forward Network (FFN), and this portion increases for larger…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Meghana Madhyastha , Daniel Haziza , Jesse Cai , Newsha Ardalani , Zhiqi Bu , Carole-Jean Wu

The quadratic complexity of attention remains the central bottleneck in long-context inference for large language models. Prior acceleration methods either sparsify the attention map with structured patterns or permanently evict tokens at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Dongwon Jo , Beomseok Kang , Jiwon Song , Jae-Joon Kim

Transformers have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks, owing to their self-attention mechanism, but they are highly energy-consuming. Spiking Neural Networks have emerged as a promising energy-efficient…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Yufei Guo , Xiaode Liu , Yuanpei Chen , Weihang Peng , Yuhan Zhang , Zhe Ma

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

The transformer architecture has become an integral part of the field of modern neural networks, playing a crucial role in a variety of tasks, such as text generation, machine translation, image and audio processing, among others. There is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Leonid Kotyuzanskiy , Artem Klimov

As the third-generation neural network, the Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has the advantages of low power consumption and high energy efficiency, making it suitable for implementation on edge devices. More recently, the most advanced SNN,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Yue Liu , Shanlin Xiao , Bo Li , Zhiyi Yu

Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Aurko Roy , Mohammad Saffar , Ashish Vaswani , David Grangier

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

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

Compression has been a critical lens to understand the success of Transformers. In the past, we have typically taken the target distribution as a criterion to evaluate a model's compression performance. Nevertheless,it often remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Matteo Pagliardini , Daniele Paliotta , Martin Jaggi , François Fleuret

The demand for efficient processing of deep neural networks (DNNs) on embedded devices is a significant challenge limiting their deployment. Exploiting sparsity in the network's feature maps is one of the ways to reduce its inference…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Matteo Grimaldi , Darshan C. Ganji , Ivan Lazarevich , Sudhakar Sah

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

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