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Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

We revisit the design choices in Transformers, and propose methods to address their weaknesses in handling long sequences. First, we propose a simple layer named gated attention unit, which allows the use of a weaker single-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Weizhe Hua , Zihang Dai , Hanxiao Liu , Quoc V. Le

Recent advances in Transformer-based Neural Operators have enabled significant progress in data-driven solvers for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Most current research has focused on reducing the quadratic complexity of attention to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Wenjie Hu , Sidun Liu , Peng Qiao , Zhenglun Sun , Yong Dou

In this paper, we propose that the dot product pairwise matching attention layer, which is widely used in Transformer-based models, is redundant for the model performance. Attention, in its original formulation, has to be seen rather as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko , Vojtěch Vančura , Daniel Vašata , Pavel Kordík , Tomáš Mikolov

Transformers have become the de facto standard for a wide range of tasks, from image classification to physics simulations. Despite their impressive performance, the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers in both memory and time with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alex Colagrande , Paul Caillon , Eva Feillet , Alexandre Allauzen

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

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

Transformers achieve remarkable performance in several tasks but due to their quadratic complexity, with respect to the input's length, they are prohibitively slow for very long sequences. To address this limitation, we express the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-01 Angelos Katharopoulos , Apoorv Vyas , Nikolaos Pappas , François Fleuret

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Neural operators offer a powerful data-driven framework for learning mappings between function spaces, in which the transformer-based neural operator architecture faces a fundamental scalability-accuracy trade-off: softmax attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Ming Zhong , Zhenya Yan

Recent advancements in Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have set new standards in natural language processing. However, the classical softmax attention incurs significant computational costs, leading to a $O(T)$ complexity for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zhihao He , Hang Yu , Zi Gong , Shizhan Liu , Jianguo Li , Weiyao Lin

Linear Transformers and State Space Models have emerged as efficient alternatives to softmax Transformers for causal sequence modeling, enabling parallel training via matrix multiplication and efficient RNN-style inference. However, despite…

Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 O. Duranthon , P. Marion , C. Boyer , B. Loureiro , L. Zdeborová

Following up on the linear transformer part of the article from Katharopoulos et al., that takes this idea from Shen et al., the trick that produces a linear complexity for the attention mechanism is re-used and extended to a second-order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-29 Jean Mercat

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

Vision Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many visual tasks. Due to the quadratic computational and memory complexities of self-attention, recent works either apply attention only to low-resolution inputs or restrict…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Cheng Li , Yangxin Liu

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

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Vision Transformers has demonstrated competitive performance on computer vision tasks benefiting from their ability to capture long-range dependencies with multi-head self-attention modules and multi-layer perceptron. However, calculating…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Xiangyu Chen , Qinghao Hu , Kaidong Li , Cuncong Zhong , Guanghui Wang