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Related papers: Long-Context Generalization with Sparse Attention

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As the core operator of Transformers, Softmax Attention exhibits excellent global modeling capabilities. However, its quadratic complexity limits its applicability to vision tasks. In contrast, Linear Attention shares a similar formulation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Yuang Ai , Ran He

The quadratic computational complexity of softmax transformers has become a bottleneck in long-context scenarios. In contrast, linear attention model families provide a promising direction towards a more efficient sequential model. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Difan Deng , Andreas Bentzen Winje , Lukas Fehring , Marius Lindauer

Attention is the critical component of a transformer. Yet the quadratic computational complexity of vanilla full attention in the input size and the inability of its linear attention variant to focus have been challenges for computer vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Nhat Thanh Tran , Fanghui Xue , Shuai Zhang , Jiancheng Lyu , Yunling Zheng , Yingyong Qi , Jack Xin

Compressed Neural Networks have the potential to enable deep learning across new applications and smaller computational environments. However, understanding the range of learning tasks in which such models can succeed is not well studied.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Matt Gorbett , Hossein Shirazi , Indrakshi Ray

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

Despite achieving state-of-the-art results in nearly all Natural Language Processing applications, fine-tuning Transformer-based language models still requires a significant amount of labeled data to work. A well known technique to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Julius Gonsior , Christian Falkenberg , Silvio Magino , Anja Reusch , Maik Thiele , Wolfgang Lehner

The per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Luke McDermott , Robert W. Heath , Rahul Parhi

Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Yichuan Deng , Zhihang Li , Zhao Song

In recent years, the long-range attention mechanism of vision transformers has driven significant performance breakthroughs across various computer vision tasks. However, the traditional self-attention mechanism, which processes both…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tianyi Zhang , Baoxin Li , Jae-sun Seo , Yu Cao

Large language models (LLMs) now support context windows of hundreds of thousands to millions of tokens, enabling applications such as long-document summarization, large-scale code synthesis, multi-document question answering and persistent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Siyuan Yan , Guo-Qing Jiang , Yuchen Zhang , Xiaoxing Ma , Ran Zhu , Chun Cao , Jingwei Xu

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

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

Token-level adaptive computation seeks to reduce inference cost by allocating more computation to harder tokens and less to easier ones. However, prior work is primarily evaluated on natural-language benchmarks using task-level metrics,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ibraheem Muhammad Moosa , Suhas Lohit , Ye Wang , Moitreya Chatterjee , Wenpeng Yin

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

Long-context inputs in large language models (LLMs) often suffer from the "lost in the middle" problem, where critical information becomes diluted or ignored due to excessive length. Context compression methods aim to address this by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Xuancheng Li , Haitao Li , Yujia Zhou , Qingyao Ai , Yiqun Liu

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Long-context agentic workflows have emerged as a defining use case for large language models, making attention efficiency critical for both inference speed and serving cost. Sparse attention addresses this challenge effectively, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yushi Bai , Qian Dong , Ting Jiang , Xin Lv , Zhengxiao Du , Aohan Zeng , Jie Tang , Juanzi Li

The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Firas Khader , Omar S. M. El Nahhas , Tianyu Han , Gustav Müller-Franzes , Sven Nebelung , Jakob Nikolas Kather , Daniel Truhn

Sequence models face a fundamental tradeoff between memory capacity and computational efficiency. Transformers achieve expressive context modeling at quadratic cost, while linear attention and state-space models run in linear time by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yaxita Amin , Helen Zichen Li , Mengfan Zhang , Samet Ayhan

Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in a wide range of NLP tasks including summarization. Training and inference using large transformer models can be computationally expensive. Previous work has focused on one…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Potsawee Manakul , Mark J. F. Gales