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The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

Researchers have long tried to minimize training costs in deep learning while maintaining strong generalization across diverse datasets. Emerging research on dataset distillation aims to reduce training costs by creating a small synthetic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Ahmad Sajedi , Samir Khaki , Ehsan Amjadian , Lucy Z. Liu , Yuri A. Lawryshyn , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis

Vision transformers have shown great success on numerous computer vision tasks. However, its central component, softmax attention, prohibits vision transformers from scaling up to high-resolution images, due to both the computational…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Hui Deng , Jianyuan Wang , Yi Zhang , Kaihao Zhang , Nick Barnes , Stan Birchfield , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong

Transformer-based models have gained large popularity and demonstrated promising results in long-term time-series forecasting in recent years. In addition to learning attention in time domain, recent works also explore learning attention in…

Transformers have improved the state-of-the-art across numerous tasks in sequence modeling. Besides the quadratic computational and memory complexity w.r.t the sequence length, the self-attention mechanism only processes information at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Yao Zhang , Yunpu Ma , Thomas Seidl , Volker Tresp

Vision Transformers (ViTs) based vision foundation models (VFMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse vision tasks, but suffer from quadratic complexity that limits scalability to long sequences. Existing linear attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Yifan Li , Seunghyun Yoon , Viet Dac Lai , Franck Dernoncourt , Jason Kuen , Yu Kong , Trung Bui

We show the formal equivalence of linearised self-attention mechanisms and fast weight controllers from the early '90s, where a ``slow" neural net learns by gradient descent to program the ``fast weights" of another net through sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Imanol Schlag , Kazuki Irie , Jürgen Schmidhuber

We propose an approximate strategy to efficiently train neural network based language models over very large vocabularies. Our approach, called adaptive softmax, circumvents the linear dependency on the vocabulary size by exploiting the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Edouard Grave , Armand Joulin , Moustapha Cissé , David Grangier , Hervé Jégou

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion is a powerful paradigm for streaming and interactive video generation. However, its reliance on softmax self-attention leads to quadratic compute complexity in sequence length and memory usage due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kunyang Li , Mubarak Shah , Yuzhang Shang

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

Transformer-based models have made remarkable progress in image restoration (IR) tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer hinders its applicability to high-resolution images. Existing methods mitigate this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Yuang Ai , Huaibo Huang , Tao Wu , Qihang Fan , Ran He

Diffusion-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on text-to-image synthesis tasks. However, one critical limitation of these models is the low fidelity of generated images with respect to the text description, such as…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Qiucheng Wu , Yujian Liu , Handong Zhao , Trung Bui , Zhe Lin , Yang Zhang , Shiyu Chang

This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Zhongjie Shi , Wenjing Liao

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

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

Attention architectures are widely used; they recently gained renewed popularity with Transformers yielding a streak of state of the art results. Yet, the geometrical implications of softmax-attention remain largely unexplored. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chuanyang Zheng

Character-level string-to-string transduction is an important component of various NLP tasks. The goal is to map an input string to an output string, where the strings may be of different lengths and have characters taken from different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Shijie Wu , Pamela Shapiro , Ryan Cotterell

Softmax attention struggles with long contexts due to structural limitations: the strict sum-to-one constraint forces attention sinks on irrelevant tokens, and probability mass disperses as sequence lengths increase. We tackle these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Xingyue Huang , Xueying Ding , Mingxuan Ju , Yozen Liu , Neil Shah , Tong Zhao

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Zhenhai Zhu , Radu Soricut