Related papers: Sparse Attention as Compact Kernel Regression
Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…
The KV cache in self-attention has emerged as a major bottleneck in long-context and large-batch inference for LLMs. Existing approaches often treat sparsity prediction and compression as separate modules, relying on auxiliary index…
In this paper, we investigate the data-driven identification of asymmetric interaction kernels in the Motsch-Tadmor model based on observed trajectory data. The model under consideration is governed by a class of semilinear evolution…
Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…
As large language models (LLMs) and visual language models (VLMs) grow in scale and application, attention mechanisms have become a central computational bottleneck due to their high memory and time complexity. While many efficient…
Previous research observed accuracy degradation when replacing the attention softmax with a point-wise activation such as ReLU. In the context of vision transformers, we find that this degradation is mitigated when dividing by sequence…
In presence of sparse noise we propose kernel regression for predicting output vectors which are smooth over a given graph. Sparse noise models the training outputs being corrupted either with missing samples or large perturbations. The…
Compressed Neural Networks have the potential to enable deep learning across new applications and smaller computational environments. However, understanding the range of learning tasks in which such models can succeed is not well studied.…
This paper investigates the limitations of the normalization in attention mechanisms. We begin with a theoretical framework that enables the identification of the model's selective ability and the geometric separation involved in token…
Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…
Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…
Transformers are becoming the mainstream solutions for various tasks like NLP and Computer vision. Despite their success, the high complexity of the attention mechanism hinders them from being applied to latency-sensitive tasks. Tremendous…
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…
We explore algorithms and limitations for sparse optimization problems such as sparse linear regression and robust linear regression. The goal of the sparse linear regression problem is to identify a small number of key features, while the…
We develop a rigorous statistical theory of multi-head attention (MHA) as an ensemble of Nadaraya-Watson (NW) kernel regression estimators. Building on the algebraic identity between single-head softmax attention and the NW estimator, we…
The design of Large Language Models (LLMs) has long been hampered by a fundamental conflict within their core attention mechanism: its remarkable expressivity is built upon a computational complexity of O(H N^2) that grows quadratically…
Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…
The quadratic complexity of attention remains the central bottleneck in long-context inference for large language models. Prior acceleration methods either sparsify the attention map with structured patterns or permanently evict tokens at…
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…
We investigate how sparse neural activity affects the generalization performance of a deep Bayesian neural network at the large width limit. To this end, we derive a neural network Gaussian Process (NNGP) kernel with rectified linear unit…