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Related papers: Rectifying Magnitude Neglect in Linear Attention

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We present TransNormerLLM, the first linear attention-based Large Language Model (LLM) that outperforms conventional softmax attention-based models in terms of both accuracy and efficiency. TransNormerLLM evolves from the previous linear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Zhen Qin , Dong Li , Weigao Sun , Weixuan Sun , Xuyang Shen , Xiaodong Han , Yunshen Wei , Baohong Lv , Xiao Luo , Yu Qiao , Yiran Zhong

Efficiently modeling massive images is a long-standing challenge in machine learning. To this end, we introduce Multi-Scale Attention (MSA). MSA relies on two key ideas, (i) multi-scale representations (ii) bi-directional cross-scale…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Kumar Krishna Agrawal , Long Lian , Longchao Liu , Natalia Harguindeguy , Boyi Li , Alexander Bick , Maggie Chung , Trevor Darrell , Adam Yala

The attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in different machine learning tasks. However, the quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length of the vanilla softmax-based attention mechanism becomes the major…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-05 Chong Wu , Maolin Che , Renjie Xu , Zhuoheng Ran , Hong Yan

Attention-based deep networks have been successfully applied on textual data in the field of NLP. However, their application on protein sequences poses additional challenges due to the weak semantics of the protein words, unlike the plain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-29 Ashish Ranjan , Md Shah Fahad , Akshay Deepak

From natural language processing to vision, Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of most modern deep learning applications. Unfortunately, its memory and computational requirements can be prohibitive in low-resource settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Peyman Hosseini , Mehran Hosseini , Ignacio Castro , Matthew Purver

Converting pretrained attention modules such as grouped-query attention (GQA) into multi-head latent attention (MLA) can improve expressivity without increasing KV-cache cost, making it attractive for efficient inference. However, many…

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang

The quadratic complexity of softmax attention presents a major obstacle for scaling Transformers to high-resolution vision tasks. Existing linear attention variants often replace the softmax with Gaussian kernels to reduce complexity, but…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Zhe Feng , Sen Lian , Changwei Wang , Muyang Zhang , Tianlong Tan , Rongtao Xu , Weiliang Meng , Xiaopeng Zhang

Current deep learning based text classification methods are limited by their ability to achieve fast learning and generalization when the data is scarce. We address this problem by integrating a meta-learning procedure that uses the…

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, improves the efficiency of large language models by projecting query, key, and value tensors into a compact latent space. This architectural change reduces the KV-cache size and…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Robin Geens , Marian Verhelst

While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

The Transformer model architecture has become one of the most widely used in deep learning and the attention mechanism is at its core. The standard attention formulation uses a softmax operation applied to a scaled dot product between query…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Hariprasath Govindarajan , Per Sidén , Jacob Roll , Fredrik Lindsten

Linearizing pretrained large language models (LLMs) primarily relies on intra-layer hybrid attention mechanisms to alleviate the quadratic complexity of standard softmax attention. Existing methods perform token routing based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Weikang Meng , Liangyu Huo , Yadan Luo , Jiawen Guan , Jingyi Zhang , Yingjian Li , Zheng Zhang

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sahil Joshi , Agniva Chowdhury , Amar Kanakamedala , Ekam Singh , Evan Tu , Anshumali Shrivastava

Mamba has recently gained widespread attention as a backbone model for point cloud modeling, leveraging a state-space architecture that enables efficient global sequence modeling with linear complexity. However, its lack of local inductive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Xuanyu Lin , Xiaona Zeng , Xianwei Zheng , Xutao Li

Recent advancements in medical imaging have resulted in more complex and diverse images, with challenges such as high anatomical variability, blurred tissue boundaries, low organ contrast, and noise. Traditional segmentation methods…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-11-01 Yufeng Jiang , Zongxi Li , Xiangyan Chen , Haoran Xie , Jing Cai

Transformers struggle with length generalisation, displaying poor performance even on basic tasks. We test whether these limitations can be explained through two key failures of the self-attention mechanism. The first is the inability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Mattia Opper , Roland Fernandez , Paul Smolensky , Jianfeng Gao

We prove that with linear transformations, both (i) two-layer self-attention and (ii) one-layer self-attention followed by a softmax function are universal approximators for continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on compact domains. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu , Hude Liu , Hong-Yu Chen , Weimin Wu , Han Liu

Transformers with linear attention (i.e., linear transformers) and state-space models have recently been suggested as a viable linear-time alternative to transformers with softmax attention. However, these models still underperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Songlin Yang , Bailin Wang , Yu Zhang , Yikang Shen , Yoon Kim