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Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Attention, as a core layer of the ubiquitous Transformer architecture, is the bottleneck for large language models and long-context applications. While FlashAttention-3 optimized attention for Hopper GPUs through asynchronous execution and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Ted Zadouri , Markus Hoehnerbach , Jay Shah , Timmy Liu , Vijay Thakkar , Tri Dao

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

The computational and memory demands of vanilla attention scale quadratically with the sequence length $N$, posing significant challenges for processing long sequences in Transformer models. FlashAttention alleviates these challenges by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Guoxia Wang , Jinle Zeng , Xiyuan Xiao , Siming Wu , Jiabin Yang , Lujing Zheng , Zeyu Chen , Jiang Bian , Dianhai Yu , Haifeng Wang

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion is a powerful paradigm for streaming and interactive video generation. However, its reliance on softmax self-attention leads to quadratic compute complexity in sequence length and memory usage due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kunyang Li , Mubarak Shah , Yuzhang Shang

Existing attention accelerators often trade exact softmax semantics, depend on fused Tensor Core kernels, or incur sequential depth that limits FP32 throughput on long sequences. We present \textbf{ELSA}, an algorithmic reformulation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Chih-Chung Hsu , Xin-Di Ma , Wo-Ting Liao , Chia-Ming Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various applications, but their performance on long-context tasks is often limited by the computational complexity of attention mechanisms. We introduce a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Bo Chen , Yingyu Liang , Zhizhou Sha , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

Transformer achieves promising results on various tasks. However, self-attention suffers from quadratic memory requirements with respect to the sequence length. Existing work focuses on reducing time and space complexity from an algorithm…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Shenggui Li , Fuzhao Xue , Chaitanya Baranwal , Yongbin Li , Yang You

Attention mechanisms, particularly softmax attention, have been instrumental in the success of transformer-based models such as GPT. However, the quadratic memory complexity of softmax attention with respect to sequence length poses…

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

We present context parallelism for long-context large language model inference, which achieves near-linear scaling for long-context prefill latency with up to 128 H100 GPUs across 16 nodes. Particularly, our method achieves 1M context…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Amy Yang , Jingyi Yang , Aya Ibrahim , Xinfeng Xie , Bangsheng Tang , Grigory Sizov , Jeremy Reizenstein , Jongsoo Park , Jianyu Huang

Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Nirmal Patel , Nilesh Gupta , Inderjit S. Dhillon

The quadratic time and memory complexity inherent to self-attention mechanisms, with respect to sequence length, presents a critical computational bottleneck in the training and deployment of large-scale Transformer-based language models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Praneeth Kacham , Vahab Mirrokni , Peilin Zhong

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success, yet their standard attention mechanism incurs quadratic computation and memory costs with respect to sequence length, posing a major bottleneck for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Tao Bu , Qiangang Wang , Bowen Zeng , Hanwen Sun , Yunpeng Huang , Chun Cao , Jingwei Xu

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Ran He

We introduce Performers, Transformer architectures which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on…

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

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Training causal transformers at extreme sequence lengths is bottlenecked by the quadratic time and memory of scaled dot-product attention (SDPA). In this work, we propose Lighthouse Attention, a training-only symmetrical selection-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Bowen Peng , Subho Ghosh , Jeffrey Quesnelle

Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Zhen Qin , Weixuan Sun , Hui Deng , Dongxu Li , Yunshen Wei , Baohong Lv , Junjie Yan , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong