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Multi-Modal Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in visual synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial computational demands. To alleviate this bottleneck, many sparsity-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Liang Qiao , Yue Dai , Yeqi Huang , Hongyu Kan , Jun Shi , Hong An

Recent advance in sparse attention mechanisms has demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs). Native Sparse Attention (NSA), one state-of-the-art…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Ran Yan , Youhe Jiang , Zhuoming Chen , Haohui Mai , Beidi Chen , Binhang Yuan

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong capabilities but incur high inference costs due to dense computation and memory access. Training-free activation sparsity is a promising approach for efficient LLM inference, yet existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Lei Chen , Yuan Meng , Xiaoyu Zhan , Zhi Wang , Wenwu Zhu

N:M Structured sparsity has garnered significant interest as a result of relatively modest overhead and improved efficiency. Additionally, this form of sparsity holds considerable appeal for reducing the memory footprint owing to their…

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are one of the most promising bio-inspired neural networks models and have drawn increasing attention in recent years. The event-driven communication mechanism of SNNs allows for sparse and theoretically…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Andrea Castagnetti , Alain Pegatoquet , Benoît Miramond

Transformers have sprung up in the field of computer vision. In this work, we explore whether the core self-attention module in Transformer is the key to achieving excellent performance in image recognition. To this end, we build an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Chuanxin Tang , Yucheng Zhao , Guangting Wang , Chong Luo , Wenxuan Xie , Wenjun Zeng

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

To overcome the quadratic cost of self-attention, recent works have proposed various sparse attention modules, most of which fall under one of two groups: 1) sparse attention under a hand-crafted patterns and 2) full attention followed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Sungjun Cho , Seonwoo Min , Jinwoo Kim , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Seunghoon Hong

We explore Multi-Head FFN (MH-FFN) as a replacement of FFN in the Transformer architecture, motivated by the structural similarity between single-head attention and FFN. While multi-head mechanisms enhance expressivity in attention, naively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Minshen Zhang , Xiang Hu , Jianguo Li , Wei Wu , Kewei Tu

The cognitive system for human action and behavior has evolved into a deep learning regime, and especially the advent of Graph Convolution Networks has transformed the field in recent years. However, previous works have mainly focused on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-16 Feng Shi , Chonghan Lee , Liang Qiu , Yizhou Zhao , Tianyi Shen , Shivran Muralidhar , Tian Han , Song-Chun Zhu , Vijaykrishnan Narayanan

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) based on Transformers have garnered significant attention due to their superior performance and high energy efficiency. However, the spiking attention modules of most existing Transformer-based SNNs are…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Zeqi Zheng , Yanchen Huang , Yingchao Yu , Zizheng Zhu , Junfeng Tang , Zhaofei Yu , Yaochu Jin

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nurullah Sevim , Ege Ozan Özyedek , Furkan Şahinuç , Aykut Koç

While Transformer architectures have demonstrated impressive scalability across domains, they continue to face challenges in long-context reasoning, computational efficiency, and structural generalization - largely due to rigid layer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Haochen You , Baojing Liu

Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving…

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

Visual AutoRegressive (VAR) modeling has garnered significant attention for its innovative next-scale prediction paradigm. However, mainstream VAR paradigms attend to all tokens across historical scales at each autoregressive step. As the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Zekun Li , Ning Wang , Tongxin Bai , Changwang Mei , Peisong Wang , Shuang Qiu , Jian Cheng

Deploying local AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), to edge devices can substantially enhance devices' independent capabilities, alleviate the server's burden, and lower the response time. Owing to these tremendous potentials,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Nobel Dhar , Bobin Deng , Md Romyull Islam , Kazi Fahim Ahmad Nasif , Liang Zhao , Kun Suo

State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Karim Ahmed , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher