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Vision Transformer has demonstrated impressive success across various vision tasks. However, its heavy computation cost, which grows quadratically with respect to the token sequence length, largely limits its power in handling large feature…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-24 Sucheng Ren , Xingyi Yang , Songhua Liu , Xinchao Wang

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

Self-attention is a method of encoding sequences of vectors by relating these vectors to each-other based on pairwise similarities. These models have recently shown promising results for modeling discrete sequences, but they are non-trivial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Matthias Sperber , Jan Niehues , Graham Neubig , Sebastian Stüker , Alex Waibel

We revisit the I/O complexity of attention in large language models. Given query-key-value matrices $Q,K,V\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, and a machine with fast memory size $M$, the goal is to compute the "attention matrix" $A=\text{softmax}(Q…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Pál András Papp , Aleksandros Sobczyk , Anastasios Zouzias

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Dayiheng Liu , Rong Xiao , Derek F. Wong , Haibo Zhang , Boxing Chen , Lidia S. Chao

Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to Large Language Models. In generative Transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, GPU-stored…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Nathan Leroux , Paul-Philipp Manea , Chirag Sudarshan , Jan Finkbeiner , Sebastian Siegel , John Paul Strachan , Emre Neftci

Over recent years, the Transformer has become a fundamental building block for sequence modeling architectures. Yet at its core is the use of self-attention, whose memory and computational cost grow quadratically with the sequence length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Qiuhao Zeng , Jerry Huang , Peng Lu , Gezheng Xu , Boxing Chen , Charles Ling , Boyu Wang

The success of self-attention lies in its ability to capture long-range dependencies and enhance context understanding, but it is limited by its computational complexity and challenges in handling sequential data with inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Md Kowsher , Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Chun-Nam Yu , Ozlem Ozmen Garibay , Niloofar Yousefi

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

Self-attention is a useful mechanism to build generative models for language and images. It determines the importance of context elements by comparing each element to the current time step. In this paper, we show that a very lightweight…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Felix Wu , Angela Fan , Alexei Baevski , Yann N. Dauphin , Michael Auli

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko

Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Martin Courtois , Malte Ostendorff , Leonhard Hennig , Georg Rehm

Convolution and self-attention are two powerful techniques for representation learning, and they are usually considered as two peer approaches that are distinct from each other. In this paper, we show that there exists a strong underlying…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xuran Pan , Chunjiang Ge , Rui Lu , Shiji Song , Guanfu Chen , Zeyi Huang , Gao Huang

The Transformer architecture has become a cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence, but its core self-attention mechanism suffers from a complexity bottleneck that scales quadratically with sequence length, severely limiting its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zhongpan Tang

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

The self-attention mechanism is the key to the success of transformers in recent Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the quadratic computational cost $O(n^2)$ in the input sequence length $n$ is a notorious obstacle for further…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-17 Yingyu Liang , Heshan Liu , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Zhuoyan Xu , Junze Yin

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

Recent work has shown that training loss scales as a power law with both model size and the number of tokens, and that achieving compute-optimal models requires scaling model size and token count together. However, these scaling laws assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Aurko Roy , Timothy Chou , Sai Surya Duvvuri , Sijia Chen , Jiecao Yu , Xiaodong Wang , Manzil Zaheer , Rohan Anil