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Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 O. Duranthon , P. Marion , C. Boyer , B. Loureiro , L. Zdeborová

Modern image retrieval systems increasingly rely on the use of deep neural networks to learn embedding spaces in which distance encodes the relevance between a given query and image. In this setting, existing approaches tend to emphasize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Andreas Veit , Kimberly Wilber

Attention is the critical component of a transformer. Yet the quadratic computational complexity of vanilla full attention in the input size and the inability of its linear attention variant to focus have been challenges for computer vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Nhat Thanh Tran , Fanghui Xue , Shuai Zhang , Jiancheng Lyu , Yunling Zheng , Yingyong Qi , Jack Xin

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

Softmax attention is the cornerstone of modern large language models, but its memory scales linearly and compute quadratically with sequence length. Linear recurrent models, such as linear attention and state space models, have become…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Kevin Y. Li , Asher Trockman , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Ziteng Sun

Softmax-based losses have achieved state-of-the-art performances on various tasks such as face recognition and re-identification. However, these methods highly relied on clean datasets with global labels, which limits their usage in many…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Qiang Meng , Xinqian Gu , Xiaqing Xu , Feng Zhou

Sequence models lie at the heart of modern deep learning. However, rapid advancements have produced a diversity of seemingly unrelated architectures, such as Transformers and recurrent alternatives. In this paper, we introduce a unifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Ke Alexander Wang , Jiaxin Shi , Emily B. Fox

As the core building block of vision transformers, attention is a powerful tool to capture long-range dependency. However, such power comes at a cost: it incurs a huge computation burden and heavy memory footprint as pairwise token…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Lei Zhu , Xinjiang Wang , Zhanghan Ke , Wayne Zhang , Rynson Lau

Large multimodal models (LMMs) inherit the self-attention mechanism of pretrained language backbones, yet standard attention can exhibit suboptimal allocation, including cross-modal misallocation between textual and visual evidence and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xi Leng , Xinhong Ma , Ziqiang Dong , Feng Zhang , Xiaoying Tang , Yang Yang , Guanjun Jiang

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of softmax attention remains a central bottleneck that limits their scalability. Alman and Song (NeurIPS…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Maryam Aliakbarpour , Vladimir Braverman , Junze Yin , Haochen 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

Cross-encoders are effective passage and document re-rankers but less efficient than other neural or classic retrieval models. A few previous studies have applied windowed self-attention to make cross-encoders more efficient. However, these…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-03-21 Ferdinand Schlatt , Maik Fröbe , Matthias Hagen

Priority queues are used in a wide range of applications, including prioritized online scheduling, discrete event simulation, and greedy algorithms. In parallel settings, classical priority queues often become a severe bottleneck, resulting…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Marvin Williams , Peter Sanders

This paper is a contribution towards interpretability of the deep learning models in different applications of time-series. We propose a temporal attention layer that is capable of selecting the relevant information to perform various…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Phongtharin Vinayavekhin , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Don Joven Agravante , Giovanni De Magistris , Daiki Kimura , Ryuki Tachibana

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sahil Joshi , Agniva Chowdhury , Amar Kanakamedala , Ekam Singh , Evan Tu , Anshumali Shrivastava

This paper proposes Attention-Seeker, an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that leverages self-attention maps from a Large Language Model to estimate the importance of candidate phrases. Our approach identifies specific components -…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Erwin D. López Z. , Cheng Tang , Atsushi Shimada

Key frame selection in video understanding presents significant challenges. Traditional top-K selection methods, which score frames independently, often fail to optimize the selection as a whole. This independent scoring frequently results…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Yiqing Yang , Kin-Man Lam

While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson