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Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Dong-Jae Lee , Sunghyun Baek , Junmo Kim

The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Shawn Tan , Songlin Yang , Aaron Courville , Rameswar Panda , Yikang Shen

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Diffusion models achieve remarkable fidelity in image synthesis, yet precise control over their outputs for targeted editing remains challenging. A key step toward controllability is to identify interpretable directions in the model's…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Tharun Anand , Mohammad Hassan Vali , Arno Solin , Green Rosh , BH Pawan Prasad

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Haixu Wu , Jialong Wu , Jiehui Xu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Chayne Thrash , Yikun Bai , Keaton Hamm , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. While these variants are memory and compute efficient,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Ankit Gupta , Guy Dar , Shaya Goodman , David Ciprut , Jonathan Berant

Attention, specifically scaled dot-product attention, has proven effective for natural language, but it does not have a mechanism for handling hierarchical patterns of arbitrary nesting depth, which limits its ability to recognize certain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Brian DuSell , David Chiang

Differential Transformer has recently gained significant attention for its impressive empirical performance, often attributed to its ability to perform noise canceled attention. However, precisely how differential attention achieves its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chaerin Kong , Jiho Jang , Nojun Kwak

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to self-attention. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the number of inference tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bo Gao , Michael W. Spratling , Letizia Gionfrida

We study the fundamental optimization principles of self-attention, the defining mechanism of transformers, by analyzing the implicit bias of gradient-based optimizers in training a self-attention layer with a linear decoder in binary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Bhavya Vasudeva , Puneesh Deora , Christos Thrampoulidis

The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Giorgio Roffo , Hazem Abdelkawy , Nilli Lavie , Luke Palmer

Attention-based models have been widely used in many areas, such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, relevant applications in time series classification (TSC) have not been explored deeply yet, causing a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Bowen Zhao , Huanlai Xing , Xinhan Wang , Fuhong Song , Zhiwen Xiao

Softmax attention defines an interaction through $d_h$ head dimensions, but not all dimensions carry equal weight once real text passes through. We decompose the attention logit field into a learned component and a generated component and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Wonsuk Lee

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Ruize He , Dongchen Han , Gao Huang

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

Transformer is a powerful tool for many natural language tasks which is based on self-attention, a mechanism that encodes the dependence of other tokens on each specific token, but the computation of self-attention is a bottleneck due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Madhusudan Verma