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Recent advances in transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their quadratic computational complexity concerning sequence length remains a significant bottleneck…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yefeng Zheng , Yingying Zhang , Derong Xu , Xuetao Wei , Tong Xu , Xiangyu Zhao

Vision Transformers have achieved impressive performance in video classification, while suffering from the quadratic complexity caused by the Softmax attention mechanism. Some studies alleviate the computational costs by reducing the number…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Kaiyue Lu , Zexiang Liu , Jianyuan Wang , Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Hui Deng , Xiaodong Han , Yuchao Dai , Yiran Zhong

Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Zhen Qin , Weixuan Sun , Hui Deng , Dongxu Li , Yunshen Wei , Baohong Lv , Junjie Yan , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong

Recently, vision transformers have become very popular. However, deploying them in many applications is computationally expensive partly due to the Softmax layer in the attention block. We introduce a simple but effective, Softmax-free…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Soroush Abbasi Koohpayegani , Hamed Pirsiavash

Block-wise sparse attention offers significant efficiency gains for long-context modeling, yet existing methods often suffer from low selection fidelity and cumulative contextual loss by completely discarding unselected blocks. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bailin Wang , Dan Friedman , Tao Lei , Chong Wang

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fanqi Yan , Huy Nguyen , Pedram Akbarian , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to self-attention. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the number of inference tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Bo Gao , Michael W. Spratling , Letizia Gionfrida

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…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

In Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, particularly for video generation, attention latency is a major bottleneck due to the long sequence length and the quadratic complexity. We find that attention weights can be separated into two parts:…

Attention-based models have been widely used in many areas, such as computer vision and natural language processing. However, relevant applications in time series classification (TSC) have not been explored deeply yet, causing a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Bowen Zhao , Huanlai Xing , Xinhan Wang , Fuhong Song , Zhiwen Xiao

Soft attention in Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) is susceptible to incorporating irrelevant information from the context into its latent representations, which adversely affects next token generations. To help rectify these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Jason Weston , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Random-feature-based attention (RFA) is an efficient approximation of softmax attention with linear runtime and space complexity. However, the approximation gap between RFA and conventional softmax attention is not well studied. Built upon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Lin Zheng , Jianbo Yuan , Chong Wang , Lingpeng Kong

Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Chayne Thrash , Yikun Bai , Keaton Hamm , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Scaling attention faces a critical bottleneck: the $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ quadratic computational cost of softmax attention, which limits its application in long-sequence domains. While linear attention mechanisms reduce this cost to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Ping He , Ali Abbasi , Yikun Bai , Xinran Liu , Elaheh Akbari , Darian Salehi , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chuanyang Zheng

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

An essential component of modern recurrent sequence models is the forget gate. While Transformers do not have an explicit recurrent form, we show that a forget gate can be naturally incorporated into Transformers by down-weighting the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Zhixuan Lin , Evgenii Nikishin , Xu Owen He , Aaron Courville

Linear attention significantly reduces the computational complexity of Transformers from quadratic to linear, yet it consistently lags behind softmax-based attention in performance. We identify the root cause of this degradation as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Weikang Meng , Liangyu Huo , Yadan Luo , Yaowei Wang , Yingjian Li , Zheng Zhang