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Related papers: Sparse Query Attention (SQA): A Computationally Ef…

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While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuan Cao , Dong Wang

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism remains a fundamental barrier to scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) to longer contexts, creating a critical bottleneck in both computation and memory. To address this, we introduce AQUA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Santhosh G S , Saurav Prakash , Balaraman Ravindran

Excessive memory requirements of key and value features (KV-cache) present significant challenges in the autoregressive inference of large language models (LLMs), restricting both the speed and length of text generation. Approaches such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Vinay Joshi , Prashant Laddha , Shambhavi Sinha , Om Ji Omer , Sreenivas Subramoney

The computational burden of attention in long-context language models has motivated two largely independent lines of work: sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity by attending to selected tokens, and gated attention variants that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Alfred Shen , Aaron Shen

The Transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern deep learning, yet its core self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic computational complexity and lacks grounding in biological neural computation. We propose Selective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hasi Hays

Transformers have become the foundation of numerous state-of-the-art AI models across diverse domains, thanks to their powerful attention mechanism for modeling long-range dependencies. However, the quadratic scaling complexity of attention…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhenkun Fan , Zishen Wan , Che-Kai Liu , Ashwin Sanjay Lele , Win-San Khwa , Bo Zhang , Meng-Fan Chang , Arijit Raychowdhury

Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) is an innovative architecture proposed by DeepSeek, designed to ensure efficient and economical inference by significantly compressing the Key-Value (KV) cache into a latent vector. Compared to MLA,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Tao Ji , Bin Guo , Yuanbin Wu , Qipeng Guo , Lixing Shen , Zhan Chen , Xipeng Qiu , Qi Zhang , Tao Gui

Multi-head attention (MHA) has become the cornerstone of modern large language models, enhancing representational capacity through parallel attention heads. However, increasing the number of heads inherently weakens individual head…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Zhanchao Zhou , Xiaodong Chen , Haoxing Chen , Zhenzhong Lan , Jianguo Li

Transformer-based LLMs have achieved exceptional performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, the standard self-attention mechanism suffers from quadratic time complexity and linearly increased cache size. Sliding window attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Yixing Xu , Shivank Nag , Dong Li , Lu Tian , Emad Barsoum

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zihan Qiu , Zekun Wang , Bo Zheng , Zeyu Huang , Kaiyue Wen , Songlin Yang , Rui Men , Le Yu , Fei Huang , Suozhi Huang , Dayiheng Liu , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

The attention mechanism of a transformer has a quadratic complexity, leading to high inference costs and latency for long sequences. However, attention matrices are mostly sparse, which implies that many entries may be omitted from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Jeffrey Willette , Heejun Lee , Sung Ju Hwang

To overcome the quadratic cost of self-attention, recent works have proposed various sparse attention modules, most of which fall under one of two groups: 1) sparse attention under a hand-crafted patterns and 2) full attention followed by a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Sungjun Cho , Seonwoo Min , Jinwoo Kim , Moontae Lee , Honglak Lee , Seunghoon Hong

Transformers have advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP) on a variety of important tasks. At the cornerstone of the Transformer architecture is the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism which models pairwise interactions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Lin Zheng , Zhiyong Wu , Lingpeng Kong

Grouped-query attention (GQA) has been widely adopted in LLMs to mitigate the complexity of multi-head attention (MHA). To transform an MHA to a GQA, neighbour queries in MHA are evenly split into groups where each group shares the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Yuang Chen , Cheng Zhang , Xitong Gao , Robert D. Mullins , George A. Constantinides , Yiren Zhao

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

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jusen Du , Jiaxi Hu , Tao Zhang , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

Sparse-Linear Attention (SLA) combines sparse and linear attention to accelerate diffusion models and has shown strong performance in video generation. However, (i) SLA relies on a heuristic split that assigns computations to the sparse or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Jintao Zhang , Haoxu Wang , Kai Jiang , Kaiwen Zheng , Youhe Jiang , Ion Stoica , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu , Joseph E. Gonzalez

From natural language processing to vision, Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of most modern deep learning applications. Unfortunately, its memory and computational requirements can be prohibitive in low-resource settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Peyman Hosseini , Mehran Hosseini , Ignacio Castro , Matthew Purver

Attention calculation is extremely time-consuming for long-sequence inference tasks, such as text or image/video generation, in large models. To accelerate this process, we developed a low-precision, mathematically-equivalent algorithm…

The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Chendong Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Wen qi Wei , Xiaoyang Qu , Haoqian Wang , Jing Xiao