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Vision Transformer (ViT) has prevailed in computer vision tasks due to its strong long-range dependency modelling ability. \textcolor{blue}{However, its large model size and weak local feature modeling ability hinder its application in real…

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of…

VRAM requirements for transformer models scale quadratically with context length due to the self-attention mechanism. In this paper we modify the decoder-only transformer, replacing self-attention with InAttention, which scales linearly…

We prove that with linear transformations, both (i) two-layer self-attention and (ii) one-layer self-attention followed by a softmax function are universal approximators for continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on compact domains. Our…

Self-attention in Transformers is typically implemented as $\mathrm{softmax}(QK^\top/\sqrt{d})V$, where $Q=XW_Q$, $K=XW_K$, and $V=XW_V$ are learned linear projections of the input $X$. We ask whether these learned projections are…

The favorable performance of Vision Transformers (ViTs) is often attributed to the multi-head self-attention (MSA). The MSA enables global interactions at each layer of a ViT model, which is a contrasting feature against Convolutional…

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Self-attention (SA) has become the cornerstone of modern vision backbones for its powerful expressivity over traditional Convolutions (Conv). However, its quadratic complexity remains a critical bottleneck for practical applications. Given…

Although quantization for linear layers has been widely used, its application to accelerate the attention process remains limited. To further enhance the efficiency of attention computation compared to SageAttention while maintaining…

Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a competitive alternative to convolutional neural networks for various computer vision applications. Specifically, ViT multi-head attention layers make it possible to embed information globally across…

Transformer language models have driven significant progress across various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. A central component of these models is the self-attention (SA) mechanism, which learns rich…

Transformer architectures have led to remarkable progress in many state-of-art applications. However, despite their successes, modern transformers rely on the self-attention mechanism, whose time- and space-complexity is quadratic in the…

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

This paper tackles the high computational/space complexity associated with Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) in vanilla vision transformers. To this end, we propose Hierarchical MHSA (H-MHSA), a novel approach that computes self-attention in…

We examine the intrinsic (within the attention head) and extrinsic (amongst the attention heads) structure of the self-attention mechanism in transformers. Theoretical evidence for invariance of the self-attention mechanism to softmax…

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to…

Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention…

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown impressive performance but still require a high computation cost as compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), one reason is that ViTs' attention measures global similarities and thus has a…

In this paper, we propose a novel token selective attention approach, ToSA, which can identify tokens that need to be attended as well as those that can skip a transformer layer. More specifically, a token selector parses the current…