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The quadratic computational and memory complexities of the Transformer's attention mechanism have limited its scalability for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we propose Luna, a linear unified nested attention mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Xuezhe Ma , Xiang Kong , Sinong Wang , Chunting Zhou , Jonathan May , Hao Ma , Luke Zettlemoyer

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

This paper introduces Exact Linear Attention (ELA), a mechanism that achieves linear computational complexity for Transformer attention by exploiting the exact decomposition property of kernel functions, thereby eliminating approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Weinuo Ou

Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention to $\mathcal{O}(T)$, but its memory state grows as $\mathcal{O}(T)$ in Frobenius norm, causing progressive interference between stored associations. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Vishal Pandey , Gopal Singh

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…

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Han Guo , Songlin Yang , Tarushii Goel , Eric P. Xing , Tri Dao , Yoon Kim

Multimodal Transformers serve as the backbone for state-of-the-art vision-language models, yet their quadratic attention complexity remains a critical barrier to scalability. In this work, we investigate the viability of Linear Attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Armin Gerami , Seyedehanita Madani , Ramani Duraiswami

While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mingwei Xu , Xuan Lin , Xinnan Guo , Wanqing Xu , Wanyun Cui

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

Recently, random feature attentions (RFAs) are proposed to approximate the softmax attention in linear time and space complexity by linearizing the exponential kernel. In this paper, we first propose a novel perspective to understand the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Chong Wang , Lingpeng Kong

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become the central paradigm in artificial intelligence, yet the core computational primitive of attention has remained structurally unchanged. Local Linear Attention (LLA) is an attention mechanism derived…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yifei Zuo , Dhruv Pai , Zhichen Zeng , Alec Dewulf , Shuming Hu , Zhaoran Wang

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

Neural operators offer a powerful data-driven framework for learning mappings between function spaces, in which the transformer-based neural operator architecture faces a fundamental scalability-accuracy trade-off: softmax attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Ming Zhong , Zhenya Yan

Linear attention offers a computationally efficient yet expressive alternative to softmax attention. However, recent empirical results indicate that the hidden state of trained linear attention models often exhibits a low-rank structure,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Philipp Nazari , T. Konstantin Rusch

Transformer models are computationally costly on long sequences since regular attention has quadratic $O(n^2)$ time complexity. We introduce Wavelet-Enhanced Random Spectral Attention (WERSA), a novel mechanism of linear $O(n)$ time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Vincenzo Dentamaro

Understanding whether attention mechanisms converge to the kernel regime is foundational to the validity of influence functions for transformer accountability. Exact NTK characterization of softmax attention is precluded by its exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Jose Marie Antonio Miñoza , Paulo Mario P. Medina , Sebastian C. Ibañez
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