English
Related papers

Related papers: Attention in Constant Time: Vashista Sparse Attent…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various applications, but their performance on long-context tasks is often limited by the computational complexity of attention mechanisms. We introduce a novel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Bo Chen , Yingyu Liang , Zhizhou Sha , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Transformer-based large language models face severe scalability challenges in long-context generation due to the computational and memory costs of full-context attention. Under practical computation and memory constraints, many…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Xianpeng Shang , Jiang Li , Zehua Duo , Qianyi Cai , Xiangdong Su

Discrete diffusion language models have shown strong potential for text generation, yet standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) misaligns with their semi-autoregressive inference: training randomly masks tokens across the entire response,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Bowen Sun , Yujun Cai , Ming-Hsuan Yang , Yiwei Wang

The decoder-only Transformer architecture with causal masking and relative position encoding (RPE) has become the de facto choice in language modeling. Despite its exceptional performance across various tasks, we have identified two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Xiang Zhuang , Yu Zhao , Jianhua Yao , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale to million-token contexts, traditional Mechanistic Interpretability techniques for analyzing attention scale quadratically with context length, demanding terabytes of memory beyond 100,000 tokens. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 J Rosser , José Luis Redondo García , Gustavo Penha , Konstantina Palla , Hugues Bouchard

We introduce Sparse Forcing, a training-and-inference paradigm for autoregressive video diffusion models that improves long-horizon generation quality while reducing decoding latency. Sparse Forcing is motivated by an empirical observation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Boxun Xu , Yuming Du , Zichang Liu , Siyu Yang , Ziyang Jiang , Siqi Yan , Rajasi Saha , Albert Pumarola , Wenchen Wang , Peng Li

The memory and computational demands of Key-Value (KV) cache present significant challenges for deploying long-context language models. Previous approaches attempt to mitigate this issue by selectively dropping tokens, which irreversibly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Hanlin Tang , Yang Lin , Jing Lin , Qingsen Han , Shikuan Hong , Yiwu Yao , Gongyi Wang

Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Liu Liu , Zheng Qu , Zhaodong Chen , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

The rapid expansion of context window sizes in Large Language Models~(LLMs) has enabled them to tackle increasingly complex tasks involving lengthy documents. However, this progress comes at the cost of a substantial increase in memory…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Da Ma , Lu Chen , Situo Zhang , Yuxun Miao , Su Zhu , Zhi Chen , Hongshen Xu , Hanqi Li , Shuai Fan , Lei Pan , Kai Yu

We propose SparseContrast, a new framework that merges dynamic sparse attention with contrastive learning for medical imaging, with a focus on chest X-ray disease detection in low-data settings. Traditional contrastive learning methods rely…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Paarth Prasad , Ruchika Malhotra

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yuhan Chen , Ang Lv , Ting-En Lin , Changyu Chen , Yuchuan Wu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Rui Yan

The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Michael Hassid , Hao Peng , Daniel Rotem , Jungo Kasai , Ivan Montero , Noah A. Smith , Roy Schwartz

Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Yizhao Gao , Zhichen Zeng , Dayou Du , Shijie Cao , Peiyuan Zhou , Jiaxing Qi , Junjie Lai , Hayden Kwok-Hay So , Ting Cao , Fan Yang , Mao Yang

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Prajwal Singhania , Siddharth Singh , Shwai He , Soheil Feizi , Abhinav Bhatele

Sparse attention as a efficient method can significantly decrease the computation cost, but current sparse attention tend to rely on window self attention which block the global information flow. For this problem, we present Shifted Cross…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Yuxiang Guo

As long-context language modeling becomes increasingly important, the cost of maintaining and attending to large Key/Value (KV) caches grows rapidly, becoming a major bottleneck in both training and inference. While prior works such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Dong Liu , Yanxuan Yu , Ben Lengerich , Ying Nian Wu

Scaling the context length of large language models (LLMs) offers significant benefits but is computationally expensive. This expense stems primarily from the self-attention mechanism, whose $O(N^2)$ complexity with respect to sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Xinghao Wang , Pengyu Wang , Dong Zhang , Chenkun Tan , Shaojun Zhou , Zhaoxiang Liu , Shiguo Lian , Fangxu Liu , Kai Song , Xipeng Qiu

An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Jintao Zhang , Chendong Xiang , Haofeng Huang , Jia Wei , Haocheng Xi , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

Leveraging long contexts is crucial for advanced AI systems, but attention computation poses a scalability challenge. While scaled dot-product attention (SDPA) exhibits token sparsity, i.e. only a few pivotal tokens significantly contribute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Aditya Desai , Shuo Yang , Alejandro Cuadron , Matei Zaharia , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Ion Stoica