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Modeling long sequences of user behaviors has emerged as a critical frontier in generative recommendation. However, existing solutions face a dilemma: linear attention mechanisms achieve efficiency at the cost of retrieval precision due to…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Lei Xin , Yuhao Zheng , Ke Cheng , Changjiang Jiang , Zifan Zhang , Fanhu Zeng

The transformer's attention mechanism has revolutionized AI and machine learning, with its efficient computation being crucial to its performance. However, calculating attention involves matrix operations interspersed with softmax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Kosmas Alexandridis , Vasileios Titopoulos , Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chunyuan Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Yuanyuan Xu , Jiarui Liu , T. S. Eugene Ng , Hanjie Chen

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

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

Transformer models have achieved remarkable success in sequential recommender systems (SRSs). However, computing the attention matrix in traditional dot-product attention mechanisms results in a quadratic complexity with sequence lengths,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Langming Liu , Xiangyu Zhao , Chi Zhang , Jingtong Gao , Wanyu Wang , Wenqi Fan , Yiqi Wang , Ming He , Zitao Liu , Qing Li

Linearizing pretrained large language models (LLMs) primarily relies on intra-layer hybrid attention mechanisms to alleviate the quadratic complexity of standard softmax attention. Existing methods perform token routing based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Weikang Meng , Liangyu Huo , Yadan Luo , Jiawen Guan , Jingyi Zhang , Yingjian Li , Zheng Zhang

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

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

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Naoki Nishikawa , Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

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

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

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

The Transformer model architecture has become one of the most widely used in deep learning and the attention mechanism is at its core. The standard attention formulation uses a softmax operation applied to a scaled dot product between query…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Hariprasath Govindarajan , Per Sidén , Jacob Roll , Fredrik Lindsten

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks by capturing long-range dependencies through self-attention mechanisms. However, long-context modeling faces significant computational inefficiencies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Shuhai Zhang , Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Zhiquan Wen , Qianyue Wang , Zhijie Qiu , Yuanqing Li , Mingkui Tan

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

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

The computational burden of attention in long-context language models has motivated two largely independent lines of work: sparse attention mechanisms that reduce complexity by attending to selected tokens, and gated attention variants that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Alfred Shen , Aaron Shen

The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Ran He

To enhance the computational efficiency of quantized Transformers, we replace the dot-product and Softmax-based attention with an alternative mechanism involving addition and ReLU activation only. This side-steps the expansion to double…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Rickard Brännvall , Andrei Stoian