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Neural operators offer a powerful data-driven framework for learning mappings between function spaces, in which the transformer-based neural operator architecture faces a fundamental scalability-accuracy trade-off: softmax attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Ming Zhong , Zhenya Yan

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

A cache-inspired approach is proposed for neural language models (LMs) to improve long-range dependency and better predict rare words from long contexts. This approach is a simpler alternative to attention-based pointer mechanism that…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-30 Ke Li , Daniel Povey , Sanjeev Khudanpur

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Generative models for Image Super-Resolution (SR) are increasingly powerful, yet their reliance on self-attention's quadratic complexity (O(N^2)) creates a major computational bottleneck. Linear Attention offers an O(N) solution, but its…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xiaohui Li , Shaobin Zhuang , Shuo Cao , Yang Yang , Yuandong Pu , Qi Qin , Siqi Luo , Bin Fu , Yihao Liu

Recently, Transformer networks have redefined the state of the art in many NLP tasks. However, these models suffer from quadratic computational cost in the input sequence length $n$ to compute pairwise attention in each layer. This has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Chulhee Yun , Yin-Wen Chang , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in popular transformer architectures poses significant challenges for training and inference, and becomes the bottleneck for long inputs. Is it possible to significantly reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yingyu Liang , Zhizhou Sha , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yufa Zhou

The quadratic complexity of dot-product attention introduced in Transformer remains a fundamental bottleneck impeding the progress of foundation models toward unbounded context lengths. Addressing this challenge, we introduce the Deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yifan Zhang

The transformer architecture has driven breakthroughs in recent years on tasks which require modeling pairwise relationships between sequential elements, as is the case in natural language understanding. However, long seqeuences pose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Heejun Lee , Jina Kim , Jeffrey Willette , Sung Ju Hwang

Graph-based next-step prediction models have recently been very successful in modeling complex high-dimensional physical systems on irregular meshes. However, due to their short temporal attention span, these models suffer from error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-27 Xu Han , Han Gao , Tobias Pfaff , Jian-Xun Wang , Li-Ping Liu

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Erwan Fagnou , Paul Caillon , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

Efficiently training LLMs with long sequences is important yet challenged by the massive computation and memory requirements. Sequence parallelism has been proposed to tackle these problems, but existing methods suffer from scalability or…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-27 Diandian Gu , Peng Sun , Qinghao Hu , Ting Huang , Xun Chen , Yingtong Xiong , Guoteng Wang , Qiaoling Chen , Shangchun Zhao , Jiarui Fang , Yonggang Wen , Tianwei Zhang , Xin Jin , Xuanzhe Liu

Effective training of today's large language models (LLMs) depends on large batches and long sequences for throughput and accuracy. To handle variable-length sequences on hardware accelerators, it is common practice to introduce padding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-07 Mario Michael Krell , Matej Kosec , Sergio P. Perez , Andrew Fitzgibbon

Transformers-based models, such as BERT, have been one of the most successful deep learning models for NLP. Unfortunately, one of their core limitations is the quadratic dependency (mainly in terms of memory) on the sequence length due to…

The transformer model is known to be computationally demanding, and prohibitively costly for long sequences, as the self-attention module uses a quadratic time and space complexity with respect to sequence length. Many researchers have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Ziwei He , Meng Yang , Minwei Feng , Jingcheng Yin , Xinbing Wang , Jingwen Leng , Zhouhan Lin

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in sequential recommender systems (SRSs). However, computing the attention matrix in traditional dot-product attention mechanisms results in a quadratic complexity with sequence lengths,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Langming Liu , Xiangyu Zhao , Chi Zhang , Jingtong Gao , Wanyu Wang , Wenqi Fan , Yiqi Wang , Ming He , Zitao Liu , Qing Li

The attention mechanism in Transformers is an important primitive for accurate and scalable sequence modeling. Its quadratic-compute and linear-memory complexity however remain significant bottlenecks. Linear attention and state-space…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Han Guo , Songlin Yang , Tarushii Goel , Eric P. Xing , Tri Dao , Yoon Kim