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Driven by the continuous development of models such as Multi-Layer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Transformer, deep learning has made breakthrough progress in fields such as computer vision and natural language…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Shuang Liu , Lina Zhao , Tian Wang , Huaqing Wang

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

Attention mechanism is a significant part of Transformer models. It helps extract features from embedded vectors by adding global information and its expressivity has been proved to be powerful. Nevertheless, the quadratic complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Hanwen Liu , Yixuan Ma , Shi Jin , Yuguang Wang

Many sparse attention mechanisms such as Neighborhood Attention have typically failed to consistently deliver speedup over the self attention baseline. This is largely due to the level of complexity in attention infrastructure, and the…

Recent progress in transformer-based architectures has demonstrated remarkable success in video generation tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of full attention mechanisms remains a critical bottleneck, particularly for high-resolution…

Transformer models rely on Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) mechanisms, where each attention head contributes to the final representation. However, their computational complexity and high memory demands due to MHSA hinders their deployment…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Lucas Maisonnave , Karim Haroun , Tom Pegeot

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

Attention-based Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) and shown strong performance in computer vision (CV) tasks. However, as the input sequence varies, the computational bottlenecks in Transformer models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Huizheng Wang , Hongbin Wang , Shaojun Wei , Yang Hu , Shouyi Yin

While the self-attention mechanism has been widely used in a wide variety of tasks, it has the unfortunate property of a quadratic cost with respect to the input length, which makes it difficult to deal with long inputs. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Xiaoya Li , Yuxian Meng , Mingxin Zhou , Qinghong Han , Fei Wu , Jiwei Li

The recently developed pure Transformer architectures have attained promising accuracy on point cloud learning benchmarks compared to convolutional neural networks. However, existing point cloud Transformers are computationally expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Cheng Zhang , Haocheng Wan , Xinyi Shen , Zizhao Wu

The quadratic cost of attention limits the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially under limited hardware memory budgets. While attention is often sparse, existing static sparse methods cannot adapt to task- or input-dependent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siheng Xiong , Joe Zou , Faramarz Fekri , Yae Jee Cho

Transformer-based architectures traditionally employ softmax to compute attention weights, which produces dense distributions over all tokens in a sequence. While effective in many settings, this density has been shown to be detrimental for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Pavlo Vasylenko , Hugo Pitorro , André F. T. Martins , Marcos Treviso

The sparse transformer can reduce the computational complexity of the self-attention layers to $O(n)$, whilst still being a universal approximator of continuous sequence-to-sequence functions. However, this permutation variant operation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Shidi Li , Christian Walder , Alexander Soen , Lexing Xie , Miaomiao Liu

Attention serves as the fundamental mechanism for long-context modeling in large language models (LLMs), yet dense attention becomes structurally prohibitive for long sequences due to its quadratic complexity. Consequently, sparse attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Junxiang Qiu , Shuo Wang , Zhengsu Chen , Hengheng Zhang , Jinda Lu , Changcheng Li , Qi Tian

The increasing demand for long-context modeling in large language models (LLMs) is bottlenecked by the quadratic complexity of the standard self-attention mechanism. The community has proposed sparse attention to mitigate this issue.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Jingze Shi , Yifan Wu , Yiran Peng , Bingheng Wu , Liangdong Wang , Guang Liu , Yuyu Luo

Spiking Transformers, which combine the scalability of Transformers with the sparse, energy-efficient property of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), have achieved impressive results in neuromorphic and vision tasks and attracted increasing…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Chenlin Zhou , Sihang Guo , Jiaqi Wang , Dongyang Ma , Kaiwei Che , Baiyu Chen , Qingyan Meng , Zhengyu Ma , Yonghong Tian

In recent years, the long-range attention mechanism of vision transformers has driven significant performance breakthroughs across various computer vision tasks. However, the traditional self-attention mechanism, which processes both…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tianyi Zhang , Baoxin Li , Jae-sun Seo , Yu Cao