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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,…
Transformers with linear attention allow for efficient parallel training but can simultaneously be formulated as an RNN with 2D (matrix-valued) hidden states, thus enjoying linear-time inference complexity. However, linear attention…
The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…
Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…
The transformer architecture predominates across various models. As the heart of the transformer, attention has a computational complexity of $O(N^2)$, compared to $O(N)$ for linear transformations. When handling large sequence lengths,…
Attention regulates information transfer between tokens. For this, query and key vectors are compared, typically in terms of a scalar product, $\mathbf{Q}^T\mathbf{K}$, together with a subsequent softmax normalization. In geometric terms,…
Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological…
Cross-attention is a core mechanism in encoder-decoder architectures, widespread in many fields, including speech-to-text (S2T) processing. Its scores have been repurposed for various downstream applications--such as timestamp estimation…
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…
The success of Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) stems from their attention mechanism. While this mechanism has been extensively studied in explainability research, particularly through the attention values obtained during the forward…
The Transformer architecture is widely deployed in many popular and impactful Large Language Models. At its core is the attention mechanism for calculating correlations between pairs of tokens. Performing an attention computation takes…
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…
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…
Self-attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting transformer-based speech models on edge devices. We introduce the Learnable Pulse Accumulator (LPA), an O(n) replacement that substitutes key-query dot products with learned…
Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…
Attention mechanism has been widely believed as the key to success of vision transformers (ViTs), since it provides a flexible and powerful way to model spatial relationships. However, is the attention mechanism truly an indispensable part…
Continual learning involves learning from a stream of data without repetition of data points, a scenario that is inherently complex due to distributional shift across tasks. We propose a query-only attention mechanism that discards keys and…
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…
How much information do NLP tasks really need from a transformer's attention mechanism at application-time (inference)? From recent work, we know that there is sparsity in transformers and that the floating-points within its computation can…
Attention plays a fundamental role in both natural and artificial intelligence systems. In deep learning, attention-based neural architectures, such as transformer architectures, are widely used to tackle problems in natural language…