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Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is a brain-inspired computing paradigm that represents and manipulates information using high-dimensional vectors, called hypervectors (HV). Traditional HDC methods, while robust to noise and inherently…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Dhruv Parikh , Viktor Prasanna

Linear attentions have shown potential for improving Transformer efficiency, reducing attention's quadratic complexity to linear in sequence length. This holds exciting promise for (1) training linear Transformers from scratch, (2)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Michael Zhang , Kush Bhatia , Hermann Kumbong , Christopher Ré

Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Nirmal Patel , Nilesh Gupta , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for visual perception tasks. The self-attention mechanism underpinning the strength of ViTs has a quadratic complexity in both computation and memory usage. This motivates the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Jiachen Lu , Junge Zhang , Xiatian Zhu , Jianfeng Feng , Tao Xiang , Li Zhang

Recent advances in video diffusion models have shifted towards transformer-based architectures, achieving state-of-the-art video generation but at the cost of quadratic attention complexity, which severely limits scalability for longer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

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

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Jiachen Lu , Jinghan Yao , Junge Zhang , Xiatian Zhu , Hang Xu , Weiguo Gao , Chunjing Xu , Tao Xiang , Li Zhang

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is a prominent framework for privacy-preserving machine learning, enabling inference directly on encrypted data. However, evaluating softmax, a core component of transformer architectures, remains particularly…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Hanjun Park , Byeongseo Min , Jiheon Woo , Min-Wook Jeong , Jongho Shin , Yongwoo Lee , Young-Sik Kim , Yongjune Kim

Sparse attention has been proposed as a way to alleviate the quadratic cost of transformers, a central bottleneck in long-context training. A promising line of work is $\alpha$-entmax attention, a differentiable sparse alternative to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Nuno Gonçalves , Hugo Pitorro , Vlad Niculae , Edoardo Ponti , Lei Li , Andre Martins , Marcos Treviso

Softmax is widely used in neural networks for multiclass classification, gate structure and attention mechanisms. The statistical assumption that the input is normal distributed supports the gradient stability of Softmax. However, when used…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Shulun Wang , Bin Liu , Feng Liu

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jusen Du , Jiaxi Hu , Tao Zhang , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

FlashAttention-style online softmax enables exact attention computation with linear memory by streaming score tiles through on-chip memory and maintaining a running maximum and normalizer. However, as attention kernels approach peak…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yupeng Sun , Yanzhao Li , Zhiqiang Zou , Bai Du , Zhiyuan Zhang , Hui Dong , Gaoyige Fan , Hui Wang

The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Giorgio Roffo , Hazem Abdelkawy , Nilli Lavie , Luke Palmer

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Can Yaras , Alec S. Xu , Pierre Abillama , Changwoo Lee , Laura Balzano

We propose an approximate strategy to efficiently train neural network based language models over very large vocabularies. Our approach, called adaptive softmax, circumvents the linear dependency on the vocabulary size by exploiting the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Edouard Grave , Armand Joulin , Moustapha Cissé , David Grangier , Hervé Jégou

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

As one of the most popular neural network modules, Transformer plays a central role in many fundamental deep learning models, e.g., the ViT in computer vision and the BERT and GPT in natural language processing. The effectiveness of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Shen Yuan , Hongteng Xu

Today's high performance deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) rely heavily on parameter optimization, which is sequential in nature and even with a powerful GPU, would have taken weeks to train them up for solving challenging tasks [22].…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-02-12 Kean Hong Lau , Yong Haur Tay , Fook Loong Lo

LLMs often struggle with memory-constrained deployment on consumer-grade hardware due to their massive parameter sizes. While existing solutions such as model compression and offloading improve deployment feasibility, they often suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Shen Xu , Xiangwen Zhuge , Zhe Xu , Yingkun Hu , Zheng Yang , Yunhao Liu