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Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang

Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) is widely used to analyze overparametrized neural networks due to the famous result by Jacot et al. (2018): in the infinite-width limit, the NTK is deterministic and constant during training. However, this result…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-22 Mariia Seleznova , Gitta Kutyniok

The quadratic complexity of softmax attention presents a major obstacle for scaling Transformers to high-resolution vision tasks. Existing linear attention variants often replace the softmax with Gaussian kernels to reduce complexity, but…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Zhe Feng , Sen Lian , Changwei Wang , Muyang Zhang , Tianlong Tan , Rongtao Xu , Weiliang Meng , Xiaopeng Zhang

As the core operator of Transformers, Softmax Attention exhibits excellent global modeling capabilities. However, its quadratic complexity limits its applicability to vision tasks. In contrast, Linear Attention shares a similar formulation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Yuang Ai , Ran He

The capacity of neural networks like the widely adopted transformer is known to be very high. Evidence is emerging that they learn successfully due to inductive bias in the training routine, typically a variant of gradient descent (GD). To…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-09 William Merrill , Vivek Ramanujan , Yoav Goldberg , Roy Schwartz , Noah Smith

There is a growing amount of literature on the relationship between wide neural networks (NNs) and Gaussian processes (GPs), identifying an equivalence between the two for a variety of NN architectures. This equivalence enables, for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-19 Jiri Hron , Yasaman Bahri , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Roman Novak

In-context learning is a remarkable property of transformers and has been the focus of recent research. An attention mechanism is a key component in transformers, in which an attention matrix encodes relationships between words in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Katsuyuki Hagiwara

Transformers are a widespread and successful model architecture, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). The essential innovation of this architecture is the Attention Mechanism, which solves the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Bernhard Bermeitinger , Tomas Hrycej , Massimo Pavone , Julianus Kath , Siegfried Handschuh

The NTK is a widely used tool in the theoretical analysis of deep learning, allowing us to look at supervised deep neural networks through the lenses of kernel regression. Recently, several works have investigated kernel models for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Maximilian Fleissner , Gautham Govind Anil , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

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

Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, and a thought-provoking paper by Bubeck and Sellke has analyzed this phenomenon through the lens of over-parameterization: interpolating smoothly the data requires…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-30 Simone Bombari , Shayan Kiyani , Marco Mondelli

For small training set sizes $P$, the generalization error of wide neural networks is well-approximated by the error of an infinite width neural network (NN), either in the kernel or mean-field/feature-learning regime. However, after a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-26 Alexander Atanasov , Blake Bordelon , Sabarish Sainathan , Cengiz Pehlevan

Pre-trained transformers are able to learn from examples provided as part of the prompt without any weight updates, a remarkable ability known as in-context learning (ICL). Despite its demonstrated efficacy across various domains, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Alexander Hsu , Zhaiming Shen , Wenjing Liao , Rongjie Lai

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

In training a neural network with gradient descent (GD), each iteration induces a linear operator that governs first-order updates to a model's internal state variables. We define this operator as the Global Empirical Neural Tangent Kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 James Hazelden , Laura Driscoll , Eli Shlizerman , Eric Shea-Brown

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xinhao Yao , Hongjin Qian , Xiaolin Hu , Gengze Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Yong Liu

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yuhong Chou , Man Yao , Kexin Wang , Yuqi Pan , Ruijie Zhu , Yiran Zhong , Yu Qiao , Jibin Wu , Bo Xu , Guoqi Li

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