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Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Marcos Treviso , António Góis , Patrick Fernandes , Erick Fonseca , André F. T. Martins

Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Nirmal Patel , Nilesh Gupta , Inderjit S. Dhillon

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

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

The softmax function is crucial in Transformer attention, which normalizes each row of the attention scores with summation to one, achieving superior performances over other alternative functions. However, the softmax function can face a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chuanyang Zheng , Yihang Gao , Guoxuan Chen , Han Shi , Jing Xiong , Xiaozhe Ren , Chao Huang , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Yu Li

Transformers have emerged as the dominant neural-network architecture, achieving state-of-the-art performance in language processing and computer vision. At the core of these models lies the attention mechanism, which requires a nonlinear,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Luis Mickeler , Kai Lion , Alfonso Nardi , Jost Kellner , Pierre Didier , Bhavin J. Shastri , Niao He , Rachel Grange

Unneeded elements in the attention's context degrade performance. We introduce Selective Attention, a simple parameter-free change to the standard attention mechanism which reduces attention to unneeded elements. Selective attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Dong-Jae Lee , Sunghyun Baek , Junmo Kim

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

The transformer architecture has driven breakthroughs in recent years on tasks which require modeling pairwise relationships between sequential elements, as is the case in natural language understanding. However, long seqeuences pose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Heejun Lee , Jina Kim , Jeffrey Willette , Sung Ju Hwang

We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Patrick Haller , Jonas Golde , Alan Akbik

Multimodal learning models have become increasingly important as they surpass single-modality approaches on diverse tasks ranging from question-answering to autonomous driving. Despite the importance of multimodal learning, existing efforts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Michal Golovanevsky , Eva Schiller , Akira Nair , Eric Han , Ritambhara Singh , Carsten Eickhoff

While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuan Cao , Dong Wang

Softmax Self-Attention (SSA) is a key component of Transformer architectures. However, when utilised within skipless architectures, which aim to improve representation learning, recent work has highlighted the inherent instability of SSA…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Leo Zhang , James Martens

State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Karim Ahmed , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Hao Peng , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith , Lingpeng Kong

Linear attention mitigates the quadratic complexity of softmax attention but suffers from a critical loss of expressiveness. We identify two primary causes: (1) The normalization operation cancels the query norm, which breaks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Liangyu Huo , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Xin Li , Zheng Zhang

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

Recent work has shown that training loss scales as a power law with both model size and the number of tokens, and that achieving compute-optimal models requires scaling model size and token count together. However, these scaling laws assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Aurko Roy , Timothy Chou , Sai Surya Duvvuri , Sijia Chen , Jiecao Yu , Xiaodong Wang , Manzil Zaheer , Rohan Anil

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood