Related papers: Untangling Component Imbalance in Hybrid Linear At…
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:…
Transformer-based methods have shown impressive performance in image restoration tasks, such as image super-resolution and denoising. However, we find that these networks can only utilize a limited spatial range of input information through…
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…
The attention mechanism in Transformers is an important primitive for accurate and scalable sequence modeling. Its quadratic-compute and linear-memory complexity however remain significant bottlenecks. Linear attention and state-space…
Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on edge devices faces severe computational and memory constraints, limiting real-time processing and on-device intelligence. Hybrid architectures combining Structured State Space Models (SSMs) with…
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…
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…
Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear attention -- avoiding the expensive pretraining costs. However,…
The evolution of large language models (LLMs) towards applications with ultra-long contexts faces challenges posed by the high computational and memory costs of the Transformer architecture. While existing sparse and linear attention…
The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…
Since the introduction of the Transformer architecture for large language models, the softmax-based attention layer has faced increasing scrutinity due to its quadratic-time computational complexity. Attempts have been made to replace it…
Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…
The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…
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…
Window attention, position embeddings, and high resolution finetuning are core concepts in the modern transformer era of computer vision. However, we find that naively combining these near ubiquitous components can have a detrimental effect…
Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…
Recently, vision transformers have become very popular. However, deploying them in many applications is computationally expensive partly due to the Softmax layer in the attention block. We introduce a simple but effective, Softmax-free…
Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…
The evolution of Vision Transformers has led to their widespread adaptation to different domains. Despite large-scale success, there remain significant challenges including their reliance on extensive computational and memory resources for…