English
Related papers

Related papers: Customizing the Inductive Biases of Softmax Attent…

200 papers

The computing cost of transformer self-attention often necessitates breaking long documents to fit in pretrained models in document ranking tasks. In this paper, we design Query-Directed Sparse attention that induces IR-axiomatic structures…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Jyun-Yu Jiang , Chenyan Xiong , Chia-Jung Lee , Wei Wang

Self-attention, an architectural motif designed to model long-range interactions in sequential data, has driven numerous recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and beyond. This work provides a theoretical analysis of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Benjamin L. Edelman , Surbhi Goel , Sham Kakade , Cyril Zhang

Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yu Zhang , Songlin Yang , Ruijie Zhu , Yue Zhang , Leyang Cui , Yiqiao Wang , Bolun Wang , Freda Shi , Bailin Wang , Wei Bi , Peng Zhou , Guohong Fu

While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mingwei Xu , Xuan Lin , Xinnan Guo , Wanqing Xu , Wanyun Cui

Recent advances in test-time scaling suggest that Large Language Models (LLMs) can gain better capabilities by generating Chain-of-Thought reasoning (analogous to human thinking) to respond a given request, and meanwhile exploring more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Yuhang Wang , Youhe Jiang , Bin Cui , Fangcheng Fu

Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Yichuan Deng , Zhihang Li , Zhao Song

Programming-based Pre-trained Language Models (PPLMs) such as CodeBERT have achieved great success in many downstream code-related tasks. Since the memory and computational complexity of self-attention in the Transformer grow quadratically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Tingting Liu , Chengyu Wang , Cen Chen , Ming Gao , Aoying Zhou

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

Pre-trained Transformer-based neural language models, such as BERT, have achieved remarkable results on varieties of NLP tasks. Recent works have shown that attention-based models can benefit from more focused attention over local regions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Zhongli Li , Qingyu Zhou , Chao Li , Ke Xu , Yunbo Cao

Image super-resolution (SR) has significantly advanced through the adoption of Transformer architectures. However, conventional techniques aimed at enlarging the self-attention window to capture broader contexts come with inherent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Chengxing Xie , Xiaoming Zhang , Linze Li , Yuqian Fu , Biao Gong , Tianrui Li , Kai Zhang

While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yining Li , Dongchen Han , Zeyu Liu , Hanyi Wang , Yulin Wang , Gao Huang

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) face efficiency bottlenecks due to the quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism when processing long contexts. Sparse attention methods offer a promising solution, but existing approaches often suffer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Lida Chen , Dong Xu , Chenxin An , Xintao Wang , Yikai Zhang , Jiangjie Chen , Zujie Liang , Feng Wei , Jiaqing Liang , Yanghua Xiao , Wei Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have played a pivotal role in revolutionizing various facets of our daily existence. Solving attention regression is a fundamental task in optimizing LLMs. In this work, we focus on giving a provable guarantee…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Yeqi Gao , Zhao Song , Weixin Wang , Junze Yin

Matrix completion is a problem that arises in many data-analysis settings where the input consists of a partially-observed matrix (e.g., recommender systems, traffic matrix analysis etc.). Classical approaches to matrix completion assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-02 Natali Ruchansky , Mark Crovella , Evimaria Terzi

Non-local (NL) block is a popular module that demonstrates the capability to model global contexts. However, NL block generally has heavy computation and memory costs, so it is impractical to apply the block to high-resolution feature maps.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Yooshin Cho , Youngsoo Kim , Hanbyel Cho , Jaesung Ahn , Hyeong Gwon Hong , Junmo Kim

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in natural language processing, they still struggle with long-context comprehension. Traditional approaches to mitigating this issue typically rely on fine-tuning or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Yifei Gao , Shaohong Chen , Lei Wang , Ruiting Dai , Ziyun Zhang , Kerui Ren , Jiaji Wu , Jun Cheng

Transformer based models are increasingly being used in various domains including recommender systems (RS). Pretrained transformer models such as BERT have shown good performance at language modelling. With the greater ability to model…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Uzma Mushtaque

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

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen