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Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

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

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

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…

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

The transformer architecture has driven breakthroughs in recent years on tasks which require modeling pairwise relationships between sequential elements, as is the case in natural language understanding. However, long seqeuences pose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Heejun Lee , Jina Kim , Jeffrey Willette , Sung Ju Hwang

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Hao Peng , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith , Lingpeng Kong

Linear Transformers and State Space Models have emerged as efficient alternatives to softmax Transformers for causal sequence modeling, enabling parallel training via matrix multiplication and efficient RNN-style inference. However, despite…

Qubit readout is a critical operation in quantum computing systems, which maps the analog response of qubits into discrete classical states. Deep neural networks (DNNs) have recently emerged as a promising solution to improve readout…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-05-01 M. A. Farooq , G. Di Guglielmo , A. Rajagopala , N. Tran , V. A. Chhabria , A. Arora

We introduce sliced ReLU attention, a new attention mechanism that departs structurally from both softmax and its approximation alternatives. Instead of applying a nonlinearity to pairwise dot products, we operate on one-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 François-Xavier Vialard , Siwan Boufadène

In Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, particularly for video generation, attention latency is a major bottleneck due to the long sequence length and the quadratic complexity. We find that attention weights can be separated into two parts:…

To mitigate the computational complexity in the self-attention mechanism on long sequences, linear attention utilizes computation tricks to achieve linear complexity, while state space models (SSMs) popularize a favorable practice of using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-17 Zicheng Liu , Siyuan Li , Li Wang , Zedong Wang , Yunfan Liu , Stan Z. Li

Attention mechanism remains the defining operator in Transformers since it provides expressive global credit assignment, yet its $O(N^2 d)$ time and memory cost in sequence length $N$ makes long-context modeling expensive and often forces…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Chenghao Zhang , Chao Feng , Yuanhao Pu , Xunyong Yang , Wenhui Yu , Xiang Li , Yongqi Liu , Lantao Hu , Kaiqiao Zhan , Han Li , Kun Gai

Neural attention has become central to many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing and related domains. Attention networks are an easy-to-train and effective method for softly simulating alignment; however, the approach does…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-09 Yuntian Deng , Yoon Kim , Justin Chiu , Demi Guo , Alexander M. Rush

Attention mechanisms have significantly advanced visual models by capturing global context effectively. However, their reliance on large-scale datasets and substantial computational resources poses challenges in data-scarce and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Chenghao Li , Chaoning Zhang , Boheng Zeng , Yi Lu , Pengbo Shi , Qingzi Chen , Jirui Liu , Lingyun Zhu , Yang Yang , Heng Tao Shen

From natural language processing to vision, Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of most modern deep learning applications. Unfortunately, its memory and computational requirements can be prohibitive in low-resource settings.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Peyman Hosseini , Mehran Hosseini , Ignacio Castro , Matthew Purver

Long-context capability and computational efficiency are among the central challenges facing today's large language models. Existing efficient attention methods reduce computational complexity, but they typically suffer from a limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Yunao Zheng , Xiaojie Wang , Lei Ren , Wei Chen

Self-attention-based models have achieved remarkable progress in short-text mining. However, the quadratic computational complexities restrict their application in long text processing. Prior works have adopted the chunking strategy to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Xianming Li , Zongxi Li , Xiaotian Luo , Haoran Xie , Xing Lee , Yingbin Zhao , Fu Lee Wang , Qing Li

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

Sequence models face a fundamental tradeoff between memory capacity and computational efficiency. Transformers achieve expressive context modeling at quadratic cost, while linear attention and state-space models run in linear time by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yaxita Amin , Helen Zichen Li , Mengfan Zhang , Samet Ayhan