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The quadratic computational complexity of MultiHead SelfAttention (MHSA) remains a fundamental bottleneck in scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) for longcontext tasks. While sparse and linearized attention mechanisms attempt to mitigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Caner Erden

The computational burden of attention in long-context language models has motivated two largely independent lines of work: sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity by attending to selected tokens, and gated attention variants that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Alfred Shen , Aaron Shen

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive performance in generative tasks but also introduce significant challenges in real-world serving due to inefficient use of the expensive, computation-optimized accelerators.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Shaoyuan Chen , Wencong Xiao , Yutong Lin , Mingxing Zhang , Yingdi Shan , Jinlei Jiang , Kang Chen , Yongwei Wu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks by generating long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Hossein Entezari Zarch , Lei Gao , Chaoyi Jiang , Murali Annavaram

Attention mechanisms underpin modern deep learning, while the quadratic time and space complexity limit scalability for long sequences. To address this, Quantum Annealing Multi-Head Attention (QAMA) is proposed, a novel drop-in operator…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-14 Peng Du , Jinjing Shi , Wenxuan Wang , Yin Ma , Kai Wen , Xuelong Li

We propose an innovative, learnable two-sided short-time Laplace transform (STLT) mechanism to supplant the traditional self attention in transformer-based LLMs. Our STLT introduces trainable parameters for each Laplace node, enabling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Andrew Kiruluta

Deploying large language model (LLM) inference at scale requires jointly selecting base models, provisioning heterogeneous GPUs, configuring parallelism, and distributing workloads under tight latency, accuracy, and budget constraints.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Jiaming Cheng , Duong Tung Nguyen

We present Lightning Attention, the first linear attention implementation that maintains a constant training speed for various sequence lengths under fixed memory consumption. Due to the issue with cumulative summation operations (cumsum),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

As large language models scale to longer contexts, loading the growing KV cache during attention computation becomes a critical bottleneck. Previous work has shown that attention computation is dominated by a small subset of tokens. This…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Di Liu , Ruitian Wang , Chen Chen , Mingliang Gong , Yongjie Yuan , Han Zhao , Yu Feng , Quan Chen , Minyi Guo

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are commonly derived by extending pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) with visual capabilities. In this work, we investigate how MLLMs process visual inputs by analyzing their attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jiahui Wang , Zuyan Liu , Yongming Rao , Jiwen Lu

The adoption of long context windows has become a standard feature in Large Language Models (LLMs), as extended contexts significantly enhance their capacity for complex reasoning and broaden their applicability across diverse scenarios.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Wenxuan Li , Chengruidong Zhang , Huiqiang Jiang , Yucheng Li , Yuqing Yang , Lili Qiu

Transformer-based architectures traditionally employ softmax to compute attention weights, which produces dense distributions over all tokens in a sequence. While effective in many settings, this density has been shown to be detrimental for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Pavlo Vasylenko , Hugo Pitorro , André F. T. Martins , Marcos Treviso

Transformer-based video diffusion models (VDMs) deliver state-of-the-art video generation quality but are constrained by the quadratic cost of self-attention, making long sequences and high resolutions computationally expensive. While…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Mohsen Ghafoorian , Denis Korzhenkov , Amirhossein Habibian

Sparse attention reduces the quadratic complexity of full self-attention but faces two challenges: (1) an attention gap, where applying sparse attention to full-attention-trained models causes performance degradation due to train-inference…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhenyi Shen , Junru Lu , Lin Gui , Jiazheng Li , Yulan He , Di Yin , Xing Sun

Transformers have improved the state-of-the-art across numerous tasks in sequence modeling. Besides the quadratic computational and memory complexity w.r.t the sequence length, the self-attention mechanism only processes information at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-12 Yao Zhang , Yunpu Ma , Thomas Seidl , Volker Tresp

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Prateek Verma , Mert Pilanci

Hybrid architectures combining state-space models with attention have achieved strong efficiency-quality tradeoffs, yet existing approaches either apply attention uniformly or learn static sparse patterns. This misses a key opportunity:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Ibne Farabi Shihab , Sanjeda Akter , Anuj Sharma

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess remarkable generalization capabilities but struggle with multi-task adaptation, particularly in balancing knowledge retention with task-specific specialization. Conventional fine-tuning methods suffer…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Dayan Pan , Zhaoyang Fu , Jingyuan Wang , Xiao Han , Yue Zhu , Xiangyu Zhao