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Efficient inference on GPUs using large language models remains challenging due to memory bandwidth limitations, particularly during data transfers between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM in attention computations. Approximate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Nirav Koley , Prajwal Singhania , Abhinav Bhatele

Although Transformers have successfully transitioned from their language modelling origins to image-based applications, their quadratic computational complexity remains a challenge, particularly for dense prediction. In this paper we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Yutong Xie , Jianpeng Zhang , Yong Xia , Anton van den Hengel , Qi Wu

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Gerard Sant , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Marta R. Costa-Jussà

Autoregressive Transformers are strong language models but incur O(T) complexity during per-token generation due to the self-attention mechanism. Recent work proposes kernel-based methods to approximate causal self-attention by replacing it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Huanru Henry Mao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Can Yaras , Alec S. Xu , Pierre Abillama , Changwoo Lee , Laura Balzano

We present the first unified study of the efficiency of self-attention-based Transformer variants spanning text, speech and vision. We identify input length thresholds (tipping points) at which efficient Transformer variants become more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Anuj Diwan , Eunsol Choi , David Harwath

Transformers have been proven a successful model for a variety of tasks in sequence modeling. However, computing the attention matrix, which is their key component, has quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length, thus making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Apoorv Vyas , Angelos Katharopoulos , François Fleuret

We introduce Attention Free Transformer (AFT), an efficient variant of Transformers that eliminates the need for dot product self attention. In an AFT layer, the key and value are first combined with a set of learned position biases, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Shuangfei Zhai , Walter Talbott , Nitish Srivastava , Chen Huang , Hanlin Goh , Ruixiang Zhang , Josh Susskind

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Prajwal Singhania , Siddharth Singh , Shwai He , Soheil Feizi , Abhinav Bhatele

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Transformers are slow and memory-hungry on long sequences, since the time and memory complexity of self-attention are quadratic in sequence length. Approximate attention methods have attempted to address this problem by trading off model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Tri Dao , Daniel Y. Fu , Stefano Ermon , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

We introduce exclusive self attention (XSA), a simple modification of self attention (SA) that improves Transformer's sequence modeling performance. The key idea is to constrain attention to capture only information orthogonal to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Shuangfei Zhai

The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Dongchen Han , Xuran Pan , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Standard inference and training with transformer based architectures scale quadratically with input sequence length. This is prohibitively large for a variety of applications especially in web-page translation, query-answering etc.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Lovish Madaan , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Himanshu Jain , Prateek Jain

Self-attention model have shown its flexibility in parallel computation and the effectiveness on modeling both long- and short-term dependencies. However, it calculates the dependencies between representations without considering the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-18 Baosong Yang , Jian Li , Derek Wong , Lidia S. Chao , Xing Wang , Zhaopeng Tu

The great success of Transformer-based models benefits from the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism, which learns token dependencies and encodes contextual information from the input. Prior work strives to attribute model decisions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Ke Xu

Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Hao Liu , Matei Zaharia , Pieter Abbeel

We introduce Monte-Carlo Attention (MCA), a randomized approximation method for reducing the computational cost of self-attention mechanisms in Transformer architectures. MCA exploits the fact that the importance of each token in an input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 Hyunjun Kim , JeongGil Ko