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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

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

Recent advance in sparse attention mechanisms has demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs). Native Sparse Attention (NSA), one state-of-the-art…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Ran Yan , Youhe Jiang , Zhuoming Chen , Haohui Mai , Beidi Chen , Binhang Yuan

One of the most popular paradigms of applying large pre-trained NLP models such as BERT is to fine-tune it on a smaller dataset. However, one challenge remains as the fine-tuned model often overfits on smaller datasets. A symptom of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-25 Yiren Chen , Xiaoyu Kou , Jiangang Bai , Yunhai Tong

State-of-the-art sparse attention methods for reducing decoding latency fall into two main categories: approximate top-$k$ (and its extension, top-$p$) and recently introduced sampling-based estimation. However, these approaches are…

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Despite impressive performance, deep neural networks require significant memory and computation costs, prohibiting their application in resource-constrained scenarios. Sparse training is one of the most common techniques to reduce these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Bowen Lei , Dongkuan Xu , Ruqi Zhang , Shuren He , Bani K. Mallick

Softmax Self-Attention (SSA) is a key component of Transformer architectures. However, when utilised within skipless architectures, which aim to improve representation learning, recent work has highlighted the inherent instability of SSA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Leo Zhang , James Martens

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

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

Block-wise sparse attention offers significant efficiency gains for long-context modeling, yet existing methods often suffer from low selection fidelity and cumulative contextual loss by completely discarding unselected blocks. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bailin Wang , Dan Friedman , Tao Lei , Chong Wang

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

The quadratic cost of attention limits the scalability of long-context LLMs, especially under limited hardware memory budgets. While attention is often sparse, existing static sparse methods cannot adapt to task- or input-dependent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siheng Xiong , Joe Zou , Faramarz Fekri , Yae Jee Cho

Recent advances in efficient Transformers have exploited either the sparsity or low-rank properties of attention matrices to reduce the computational and memory bottlenecks of modeling long sequences. However, it is still challenging to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Beidi Chen , Tri Dao , Eric Winsor , Zhao Song , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

Active learning enables efficient model training by leveraging interactions between machine learning agents and human annotators. We study and propose a novel framework that formulates batch active learning from the sparse approximation's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Maohao Shen , Bowen Jiang , Jacky Yibo Zhang , Oluwasanmi Koyejo

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

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…

Sparse Transformer has recently attracted a lot of attention since the ability for reducing the quadratic dependency on the sequence length. We argue that two factors, information bottleneck sensitivity and inconsistency between different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-24 Yang Liu , Jiaxiang Liu , Li Chen , Yuxiang Lu , Shikun Feng , Zhida Feng , Yu Sun , Hao Tian , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang

Transformer language models have driven significant progress across various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. A central component of these models is the self-attention (SA) mechanism, which learns rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Suvadeep Hajra

Tabular data poses unique challenges for deep learning due to its heterogeneous feature types, lack of spatial structure, and often limited sample sizes. We propose TabNSA, a novel deep learning framework that integrates Native Sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Ali Eslamian , Qiang Cheng