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Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended context lengths face significant computational challenges during the pre-filling phase, primarily due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing methods typically employ dynamic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yu Zhang , Dong Guo , Fang Wu , Guoliang Zhu , Dian Ding , Yiming Zhang

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

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 Transformer model is widely successful on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention limit its application on long text. In this paper, adopting a fine-to-coarse attention mechanism on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Zihao Ye , Qipeng Guo , Quan Gan , Xipeng Qiu , Zheng Zhang

Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, yet the high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. Sparse attention offers a promising direction for improving…

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

Transformer models achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. They however suffer from a prohibitive limitation due to the self-attention mechanism, inducing $O(n^2)$ complexity with regard to sequence length. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Charles Condevaux , Sébastien Harispe

The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zecheng Tang , Quantong Qiu , Yi Yang , Zhiyi Hong , Haiya Xiang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Dan Peng , Zhihui Fu , Zewen Ye , Zhuoran Song , Jun Wang

Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yizhao Gao , Zhichen Zeng , Dayou Du , Shijie Cao , Peiyuan Zhou , Jiaxing Qi , Junjie Lai , Hayden Kwok-Hay So , Ting Cao , Fan Yang , Mao Yang

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 modern large language models (LLMs), increasing the context length is crucial for improving comprehension and coherence in long-context, multi-modal, and retrieval-augmented language generation. While many recent transformer models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Heejun Lee , Geon Park , Youngwan Lee , Jaduk Suh , Jina Kim , Wonyoung Jeong , Bumsik Kim , Hyemin Lee , Myeongjae Jeon , Sung Ju Hwang

The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) has long been hampered by a fundamental conflict within their core attention mechanism: its remarkable expressivity is built upon a computational complexity of O(H N^2) that grows quadratically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mingkuan Zhao , Wentao Hu , Jiayin Wang , Xin Lai , Tianchen Huang , Yuheng Min , Rui Yan , Xiaoyan Zhu

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Long-context models are essential for many applications but face inefficiencies in loading large KV caches during decoding. Prior methods enforce fixed token budgets for sparse attention, assuming a set number of tokens can approximate full…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Kan Zhu , Tian Tang , Qinyu Xu , Yile Gu , Zhichen Zeng , Rohan Kadekodi , Liangyu Zhao , Ang Li , Arvind Krishnamurthy , Baris Kasikci

Transformers are powerful sequence models, but require time and memory that grows quadratically with the sequence length. In this paper we introduce sparse factorizations of the attention matrix which reduce this to $O(n \sqrt{n})$. We also…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-25 Rewon Child , Scott Gray , Alec Radford , Ilya Sutskever

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Efficient Transformers have been developed for long sequence modeling, due to their subquadratic memory and time complexity. Sparse Transformer is a popular approach to improving the efficiency of Transformers by restricting self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Aosong Feng , Irene Li , Yuang Jiang , Rex Ying

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Shuhai Zhang , Zhijie Qiu , Tingyu Wu , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan