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Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Simran Arora , Sabri Eyuboglu , Michael Zhang , Aman Timalsina , Silas Alberti , Dylan Zinsley , James Zou , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

Long-rollout causal video diffusion has converged on a fixed-size sliding-window KV cache, with recent progress innovating within this layout by changing which tokens occupy the window or how their positions are encoded. The per-head KV…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hidir Yesiltepe , Jiazhen Hu , Tuna Han Salih Meral , Adil Kaan Akan , Kaan Oktay , Hoda Eldardiry , Pinar Yanardag

As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Zhengyu Tian , Anantha Padmanaban Krishna Kumar , Hemant Krishnakumar , Reza Rawassizadeh

The quadratic computational complexity of MultiHead SelfAttention (MHSA) remains a fundamental bottleneck in scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) for longcontext tasks. While sparse and linearized attention mechanisms attempt to mitigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Caner Erden

The advent of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized various natural language processing tasks. These models predominantly employ an auto-regressive decoding mechanism that utilizes Key-Value (KV) caches to eliminate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Hao Yu , Zelan Yang , Shen Li , Yong Li , Jianxin Wu

Large language models have revolutionized data processing in numerous domains, with their ability to handle extended context reasoning receiving notable recognition. To speed up inference, maintaining a key-value (KV) cache memory is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Zhen Yang , J. N. Han , Kan Wu , Ruobing Xie , An Wang , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang

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

Multi-headed Attention's (MHA) quadratic compute and linearly growing KV-cache make long-context transformers expensive to train and serve. Prior works such as Grouped Query Attention (GQA) and Multi-Latent Attention (MLA) shrink the cache,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Tomas Figliolia , Nicholas Alonso , Rishi Iyer , Quentin Anthony , Beren Millidge

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

As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu , Ben Lengerich , Ying Nian Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the central paradigm in artificial intelligence, yet the core computational primitive of attention has remained structurally unchanged. Local Linear Attention (LLA) is an attention mechanism derived…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yifei Zuo , Dhruv Pai , Zhichen Zeng , Alec Dewulf , Shuming Hu , Zhaoran Wang

In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

In large language models built upon the Transformer architecture, recent studies have shown that inter-head interaction can enhance attention performance. Motivated by this, we propose Multi-head Explicit Attention (MEA), a simple yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Runyu Peng , Yunhua Zhou , Demin Song , Kai Lv , Bo Wang , Qipeng Guo , Xipeng Qiu

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

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

Large Language Models capable of handling extended contexts are in high demand, yet their inference remains challenging due to substantial Key-Value cache size and high memory bandwidth requirements. Previous research has demonstrated that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Junlin Mu , Hantao Huang , Jihang Zhang , Minghui Yu , Tao Wang , Yidong Li

Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is the core computational primitive underlying modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, MHA suffers from a fundamental linear scaling limitation: $H$ attention heads produce exactly $H$ independent attention…

With the rise of Transformer models in NLP and CV domain, Multi-Head Attention has been proven to be a game-changer. However, its expensive computation poses challenges to the model throughput and efficiency, especially for the long…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-12 Jiing-Ping Wang , Ming-Guang Lin , An-Yeu , Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a pivotal research area, yet the attention module remains a critical bottleneck in LLM inference, even with techniques like KVCache to mitigate redundant computations. While various top-$k$…

We propose Hymba, a family of small language models featuring a hybrid-head parallel architecture that integrates transformer attention mechanisms with state space models (SSMs) for enhanced efficiency. Attention heads provide…