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Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown their competitive advantages performance-wise compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) though they often come with high computational costs. To this end, previous methods explore different…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Cong Wei , Brendan Duke , Ruowei Jiang , Parham Aarabi , Graham W. Taylor , Florian Shkurti

Existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of Transformers predominantly rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution. Under this paradigm, the network structure remains static along the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yao Chen , Yilong Chen , Yinqi Yang , Junyuan Shang , Zhenyu Zhang , Zefeng Zhang , Shuaiyi Nie , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , HaiFeng Wang , Tingwen Liu

Previous work has demonstrated that MLPs within ReLU Transformers exhibit high levels of sparsity, with many of their activations equal to zero for any given token. We build on that work to more deeply explore how token-level sparsity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Cody Wild , Jesper Anderson

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have been recently integrated into Transformer architectures due to their potential to reduce computational demands and to improve power efficiency. Yet, the implementation of the attention mechanism using…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zihang Song , Prabodh Katti , Osvaldo Simeone , Bipin Rajendran

Recently, Transformer-based image restoration networks have achieved promising improvements over convolutional neural networks due to parameter-independent global interactions. To lower computational cost, existing works generally limit…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-06 Jiale Zhang , Yulun Zhang , Jinjin Gu , Yongbing Zhang , Linghe Kong , Xin Yuan

Transformers have outperformed recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in natural language generation. But this comes with a significant computational cost, as the attention mechanism's complexity scales quadratically with sequence length.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-21 Jungo Kasai , Hao Peng , Yizhe Zhang , Dani Yogatama , Gabriel Ilharco , Nikolaos Pappas , Yi Mao , Weizhu Chen , Noah A. Smith

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jifeng Song , Kai Huang , Xiangyu Yin , Boyuan Yang , Wei Gao

Large Language Models (LLMs) with billions of parameters have drastically transformed AI applications. However, their demanding computation during inference has raised significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices.…

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional message-passing graph neural networks in many studies, especially in processing graph data with long-range dependencies. However, GTs tend to suffer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Zhonghao Li , Ji Shi , Xinming Zhang , Miao Zhang , Bo Li

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer inherent advantages for low-power inference through sparse, event-driven computation. However, the theoretical energy benefits of SNNs are often decoupled from real hardware performance due to the opaque…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Ilkin Aliyev , Jesus Lopez , Tosiron Adegbija

Diffusion Transformers dominate video generation, but the quadratic complexity of attention computation introduces substantial latency. Attention sparsity reduces computational costs by focusing on critical tokens while ignoring…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Xuewen Liu , Zhikai Li , Jing Zhang , Mengjuan Chen , Qingyi Gu

The advent of Transformers marked a significant breakthrough in sequence modelling, providing a highly performant architecture capable of leveraging GPU parallelism. However, Transformers are computationally expensive at inference time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Leo Feng , Frederick Tung , Hossein Hajimirsadeghi , Mohamed Osama Ahmed , Yoshua Bengio , Greg Mori

Transformers are considered one of the most important deep learning models since 2018, in part because it establishes state-of-the-art (SOTA) records and could potentially replace existing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Despite the remarkable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 Hongwu Peng , Shaoyi Huang , Shiyang Chen , Bingbing Li , Tong Geng , Ang Li , Weiwen Jiang , Wujie Wen , Jinbo Bi , Hang Liu , Caiwen Ding

Transformer architecture has been very successful long runner in the field of Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLM) because of its powerful attention-based learning and parallel-natured architecture. As the models grow gigantic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Phani Kumar , Nyshadham , Jyothendra Varma , Polisetty V R K , Aditya Rathore

As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Eli Sason , Darya Frolova , Boris Nazarov , Felix Goldberd

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have become the de facto starting point for fine-tuning on downstream tasks. However, as model sizes continue to increase, traditional fine-tuning of all the parameters becomes challenging. To address this,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Bharat Runwal , Tejaswini Pedapati , Pin-Yu Chen

Recently, Transformer networks have redefined the state of the art in many NLP tasks. However, these models suffer from quadratic computational cost in the input sequence length $n$ to compute pairwise attention in each layer. This has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Chulhee Yun , Yin-Wen Chang , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Emergence is a fascinating property of large language models and neural networks more broadly: as models scale and train for longer, they sometimes develop new abilities in sudden ways. Despite initial studies, we still lack a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Nicolas Zucchet , Francesco d'Angelo , Andrew K. Lampinen , Stephanie C. Y. Chan

Recently, large models, such as Vision Transformer and BERT, have garnered significant attention due to their exceptional performance. However, their extensive computational requirements lead to considerable power and hardware resource…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Zhengke Li , Wendong Mao , Siyu Zhang , Qiwei Dong , Zhongfeng Wang

Activation sparsity offers a compelling route to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by selectively suppressing hidden activations, yet existing approaches exhibit severe accuracy degradation at high sparsity. We show that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Haotian Xu , Jiannan Yang , Tian Gao , Tsui-Wei Weng , Tengfei Ma