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With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

Transformer networks have achieved remarkable empirical success across a wide range of applications, yet their theoretical expressive power remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the expressive capabilities of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Linyan Gu , Lihua Yang , Feng Zhou

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) towards applications with ultra-long contexts faces challenges posed by the high computational and memory costs of the Transformer architecture. While existing sparse and linear attention…

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

The attention mechanism has been the core component in modern transformer architectures. However, the computation of standard full attention scales quadratically with the sequence length, serving as a major bottleneck in long-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yusheng Zhao , Hourun Li , Bohan Wu , Yichun Yin , Lifeng Shang , Jingyang Yuan , Meng Zhang , Ming Zhang

This paper describes a novel hierarchical attention network for reading comprehension style question answering, which aims to answer questions for a given narrative paragraph. In the proposed method, attention and fusion are conducted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-14 Wei Wang , Ming Yan , Chen Wu

The quadratic computational complexity of MultiHead SelfAttention (MHSA) remains a fundamental bottleneck in scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) for longcontext tasks. While sparse and linearized attention mechanisms attempt to mitigate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Caner Erden

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in modeling complex language patterns but face significant computational costs during inference, especially with long inputs due to the attention mechanism's memory overhead. We observe…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Ruiqing Yan , Linghan Zheng , Xingbo Du , Han Zou , Yufeng Guo , Jianfei Yang

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

Deep neural networks are composed of layers of parametrised linear operations intertwined with non linear activations. In basic models, such as the multi-layer perceptron, a linear layer operates on a simple input vector embedding of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Jean-Marc Andreoli

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…

Linear attention offers a linear-time alternative to self-attention but often struggles to capture long-range patterns. We revisit linear attention through a prediction-correction lens and show that prevalent variants can be written as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Xunhao Lai , Jialiang Kang , Jianqiao Lu , Tong Lin , Pengyu Zhao

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Qingru Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Sheng Zha , Tuo Zhao

Transformer networks have lead to important progress in language modeling and machine translation. These models include two consecutive modules, a feed-forward layer and a self-attention layer. The latter allows the network to capture long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Edouard Grave , Guillaume Lample , Herve Jegou , Armand Joulin

Recent studies on interpretability of attention distributions have led to notions of faithful and plausible explanations for a model's predictions. Attention distributions can be considered a faithful explanation if a higher attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Akash Kumar Mohankumar , Preksha Nema , Sharan Narasimhan , Mitesh M. Khapra , Balaji Vasan Srinivasan , Balaraman Ravindran

Transformers' quadratic computational complexity limits their scalability despite remarkable performance. While linear attention reduces this to linear complexity, pre-training such models from scratch remains, in most cases, prohibitively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Martin Benfeghoul , Teresa Delgado , Adnan Oomerjee , Haitham Bou Ammar , Jun Wang , Zafeirios Fountas

This note is a survey of various results on the capabilities of unique hard attention transformers encoders (UHATs) to recognize formal languages. We distinguish between masked vs. non-masked, finite vs. infinite image and general vs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Leonid Ryvkin

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable reasoning capabilities through transformer architectures with attention mechanisms. However, transformers suffer from quadratic time and memory complexity in the attention module (MHA) and…

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Barna Saha , Yinzhan Xu , Christopher Ye , Hantao Yu