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Related papers: Scaling Context Requires Rethinking Attention

200 papers

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

Linear transformers aim to reduce the quadratic space-time complexity of vanilla transformers. However, they usually suffer from degraded performances on various tasks and corpus. In this paper, we examine existing kernel-based linear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Zhen Qin , XiaoDong Han , Weixuan Sun , Dongxu Li , Lingpeng Kong , Nick Barnes , Yiran Zhong

As the demand for processing extended textual data grows, the ability to handle long-range dependencies and maintain computational efficiency is more critical than ever. One of the key issues for long-sequence modeling using attention-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Aosong Feng , Rex Ying , Leandros Tassiulas

Efficient attention mechanisms enable long-context transformers but often miss globally important tokens, degrading modeling quality. We introduce a pre-scoring framework that assigns a query-independent global importance prior to keys…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Zhexiang Li , Haoyu Wang , Yutong Bao , David Woodruff

Transformer-based large language models face severe scalability challenges in long-context generation due to the computational and memory costs of full-context attention. Under practical computation and memory constraints, many…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xianpeng Shang , Jiang Li , Zehua Duo , Qianyi Cai , Xiangdong Su

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

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

Transformers have shown dominant performance across a range of domains including language and vision. However, their computational cost grows quadratically with the sequence length, making their usage prohibitive for resource-constrained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Yinghan Long , Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury , Kaushik Roy

Multimodal Transformers serve as the backbone for state-of-the-art vision-language models, yet their quadratic attention complexity remains a critical barrier to scalability. In this work, we investigate the viability of Linear Attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Armin Gerami , Seyedehanita Madani , Ramani Duraiswami

Linear transformers have emerged as a subquadratic-time alternative to softmax attention and have garnered significant interest due to their fixed-size recurrent state that lowers inference cost. However, their original formulation suffers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Jean Mercat , Igor Vasiljevic , Sedrick Keh , Kushal Arora , Achal Dave , Adrien Gaidon , Thomas Kollar

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Xiaoxuan Yang , Peilin Chen , Tergel Molom-Ochir , Yiran Chen

Training causal transformers at extreme sequence lengths is bottlenecked by the quadratic time and memory of scaled dot-product attention (SDPA). In this work, we propose Lighthouse Attention, a training-only symmetrical selection-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Bowen Peng , Subho Ghosh , Jeffrey Quesnelle

One of the key challenges in Transformer architectures is the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism, which limits the efficient processing of long sequences. Many recent research works have attempted to provide a reduction from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Kaleel Mahmood , Shaoyi Huang

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing and understanding extensive text sequences, a critical aspect in applications requiring deep comprehension and synthesis of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Kaiqiang Song , Xiaoyang Wang , Sangwoo Cho , Xiaoman Pan , Dong Yu

Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence…

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Qiuwu Chen , Ying Sun , Shuhai Zhang , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

Over more than a decade there has been an extensive research effort on how to effectively utilize recurrent models and attention. While recurrent models aim to compress the data into a fixed-size memory (called hidden state), attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Ali Behrouz , Peilin Zhong , Vahab Mirrokni

Autoregressive Transformers adopted in Large Language Models (LLMs) are hard to scale to long sequences. Despite several works trying to reduce their computational cost, most of LLMs still adopt attention layers between all pairs of tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Sotiris Anagnostidis , Dario Pavllo , Luca Biggio , Lorenzo Noci , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

Large language models have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks, owing to their exceptional capabilities in context modeling. The most commonly used method of context modeling is full self-attention, as seen in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Zhisong Zhang , Yan Wang , Xinting Huang , Tianqing Fang , Hongming Zhang , Chenlong Deng , Shuaiyi Li , Dong Yu