English
Related papers

Related papers: Self-Attention at Constant Cost per Token via Symm…

200 papers

In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenglun Kong , Yize Li , Fanhu Zeng , Lei Xin , Shvat Messica , Xue Lin , Pu Zhao , Manolis Kellis , Hao Tang , Marinka Zitnik

Self-attention is essential to Transformer architectures, yet how information is embedded in the self-attention matrices and how different objective functions impact this process remains unclear. We present a mathematical framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Matteo Saponati , Pascal Sager , Pau Vilimelis Aceituno , Thilo Stadelmann , Benjamin Grewe

The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Dongchen Han , Tianyu Li , Ziyi Wang , Gao Huang

While the self-attention mechanism has been widely used in a wide variety of tasks, it has the unfortunate property of a quadratic cost with respect to the input length, which makes it difficult to deal with long inputs. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Xiaoya Li , Yuxian Meng , Mingxin Zhou , Qinghong Han , Fei Wu , Jiwei Li

The versatility of self-attention mechanism earned transformers great success in almost all data modalities, with limitations on the quadratic complexity and difficulty of training. Efficient transformers, on the other hand, often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Minh Lenhat , Viet Anh Nguyen , Khoa Nguyen , Duong Duc Hieu , Dao Huu Hung , Truong Son Hy

Self-attention in transformer models is an incremental associative memory that maps key vectors to value vectors. One way to speed up self-attention is to employ GPU-compatible vector search algorithms based on standard partitioning methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré , Gergely Szilvasy , Maria Lomeli , Francisco Massa , Naila Murray , Hervé Jégou , Matthijs Douze

Transformers have become the dominant architecture across a wide range of domains, largely due to the effectiveness of multi-head attention in capturing diverse representation subspaces. However, standard multi-head attention activates all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Bilal Faye , Abdoulaye Mbaye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Penghao Yu , Haotian Jiang , Zeyu Bao , Ruoxi Yu , Qianxiao Li

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Jintao Zhang , Jia Wei , Haofeng Huang , Pengle Zhang , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

The self-attention mechanism has significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, facilitating the development of advanced language-learning machines. Although its utility is widely acknowledged, the precise mechanisms of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Tal Halevi , Yarden Tzach , Ronit D. Gross , Shalom Rosner , Ido Kanter

Transformer has achieved great success in the NLP field by composing various advanced models like BERT and GPT. However, Transformer and its existing variants may not be optimal in capturing token distances because the position or distance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Yongfeng Huang

Reasoning models have gained significant attention due to their strong performance, particularly when enhanced with retrieval augmentation. However, these models often incur high computational costs, as both retrieval and reasoning tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Helia Hashemi , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. While these variants are memory and compute efficient,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Ankit Gupta , Guy Dar , Shaya Goodman , David Ciprut , Jonathan Berant

Deep learning models have been widely applied in various aspects of daily life. Many variant models based on deep learning structures have achieved even better performances. Attention-based architectures have become almost ubiquitous in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Zhiying Fang , Yidong Ouyang , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Guang Cheng

Despite their power, Transformers face challenges with long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. To address this limitation, methods like $k$-Nearest-Neighbor ($k$NN) attention have been introduced [Roy, Saffar,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Themistoklis Haris

Transformer-based language models are trained on large datasets to predict the next token given an input sequence. Despite this simple training objective, they have led to revolutionary advances in natural language processing. Underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Yingcong Li , Yixiao Huang , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

While transformers have begun to dominate many tasks in vision, applying them to large images is still computationally difficult. A large reason for this is that self-attention scales quadratically with the number of tokens, which in turn,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Daniel Bolya , Cheng-Yang Fu , Xiaoliang Dai , Peizhao Zhang , Judy Hoffman

The self-attention (SA) mechanism has demonstrated superior performance across various domains, yet it suffers from substantial complexity during both training and inference. The next-generation architecture, aiming at retaining the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Guoxin Feng

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across multiple NLP tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism complexity scales quadratically with the sequence length, creating an obstacle for tasks involving long sequences, like in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Belen Alastruey , Javier Ferrando , Gerard I. Gállego , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Multi-head self-attention forms the core of Transformer networks. However, their quadratically growing complexity with respect to the input sequence length impedes their deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. We address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-08 Zuzana Jelčicová , Marian Verhelst