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

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The pursuit of reducing the memory footprint of the self-attention mechanism in multi-headed self attention (MHA) spawned a rich portfolio of methods, e.g., group-query attention (GQA) and multi-head latent attention (MLA). The methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Timon Klein , Jonas Kusch , Sebastian Sager , Stefan Schnake , Steffen Schotthöfer

By integrating the self-attention capability and the biological properties of Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), Spikformer applies the flourishing Transformer architecture to SNNs design. It introduces a Spiking Self-Attention (SSA) module to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Qingyu Wang , Duzhen Zhang , Tielin Zhang , Bo Xu

Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu

Self-attention scales quadratically with input size, limiting its use for large-scale physical systems. Although sparse attention mechanisms provide a viable alternative, they are primarily designed for regular structures such as text or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Catalin E. Brita , Hieu Nguyen , Lohithsai Yadala Chanchu , Domonkos Nagy , Maksim Zhdanov

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced natural language processing (NLP) and has been foundational in developing large language models (LLMs) such as LLaMA and OPT, which have come to dominate a broad range of NLP tasks.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Youpeng Zhao , Di Wu , Jun Wang

Dynamic sparse attention (DSA) reduces the per-token attention bandwidth by restricting computation to a top-k subset of cached key-value (KV) entries, but its token-dependent selection pattern introduces a system-level challenge: the KV…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Noam Levy

Visual attention mechanisms are widely used in multimodal tasks, as visual question answering (VQA). One drawback of softmax-based attention mechanisms is that they assign some probability mass to all image regions, regardless of their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-09 Pedro Henrique Martins , Vlad Niculae , Zita Marinho , André Martins

Transformers have dominated sequence processing tasks for the past seven years -- most notably language modeling. However, the inherent quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism remains a significant bottleneck as context length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Alexander M. Fichtl , Jeremias Bohn , Josefin Kelber , Edoardo Mosca , Georg Groh

We introduce SA-DQAS, a novel framework that enhances Differentiable Quantum Architecture Search (DQAS) by integrating a self-attention mechanism, enabling more effective quantum circuit design for variational quantum algorithms. Unlike…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-08-05 Yize Sun , Jiarui Liu , Zixin Wu , Volker Tresp , Yunpu Ma

Long-sequence processing is a critical capability for modern large language models. However, the self-attention mechanism in the standard Transformer architecture faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks when processing long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Weilin Zhao , Zihan Zhou , Zhou Su , Chaojun Xiao , Yuxuan Li , Yanghao Li , Yudi Zhang , Weilun Zhao , Zhen Li , Yuxiang Huang , Ao Sun , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu

In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is a key component of Transformer. In MHA, attention heads work independently, causing problems such as low-rank bottleneck of attention score matrices and head redundancy. We propose Dynamically Composable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Da Xiao , Qingye Meng , Shengping Li , Xingyuan Yuan

Vision Transformers (ViT) serve as powerful vision models. Unlike convolutional neural networks, which dominated vision research in previous years, vision transformers enjoy the ability to capture long-range dependencies in the data.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Moab Arar , Ariel Shamir , Amit H. Bermano

The state-of-the-art speech enhancement has limited performance in speech estimation accuracy. Recently, in deep learning, the Transformer shows the potential to exploit the long-range dependency in speech by self-attention. Therefore, it…

Sound · Computer Science 2023-05-10 Yi Li , Yang Sun , Syed Mohsen Naqvi

Attention scales quadratically with sequence length, fundamentally limiting long-context inference. Existing block-granularity sparsification can reduce latency, but coarse blocks impose an intrinsic sparsity ceiling, making further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Yu Zhang , Songwei Liu , Chenqian Yan , Sheng Lin , Beichen Ning , Fangmin Chen , Xing Wang

Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari

Converting pretrained attention modules such as grouped-query attention (GQA) into multi-head latent attention (MLA) can improve expressivity without increasing KV-cache cost, making it attractive for efficient inference. However, many…

We introduce Monte-Carlo Attention (MCA), a randomized approximation method for reducing the computational cost of self-attention mechanisms in Transformer architectures. MCA exploits the fact that the importance of each token in an input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Hyunjun Kim , JeongGil Ko

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to…