English
Related papers

Related papers: Why Attend to Everything? Focus is the Key

200 papers

Recently Transformers have provided state-of-the-art performance in sparse matching, crucial to realize high-performance 3D vision applications. Yet, these Transformers lack efficiency due to the quadratic computational complexity of their…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-04-25 Suwichaya Suwanwimolkul , Satoshi Komorita

We propose an end-to-end-trainable attention module for convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures built for image classification. The module takes as input the 2D feature vector maps which form the intermediate representations of the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-05-01 Saumya Jetley , Nicholas A. Lord , Namhoon Lee , Philip H. S. Torr

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

We study the power of cross-attention in the Transformer architecture within the context of transfer learning for machine translation, and extend the findings of studies into cross-attention when training from scratch. We conduct a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Mozhdeh Gheini , Xiang Ren , Jonathan May

Clustering is a core task in machine learning with wide-ranging applications in data mining and pattern recognition. However, its unsupervised nature makes it inherently challenging. Many existing clustering algorithms suffer from critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Ahmed Shokry , Ayman Khalafallah

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

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…

Transfer learning involves adapting a pre-trained model to novel downstream tasks. However, we observe that current transfer learning methods often fail to focus on task-relevant features. In this work, we explore refocusing model attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-12 Baifeng Shi , Siyu Gai , Trevor Darrell , Xin Wang

Pairwise dot product-based attention allows Transformers to exchange information between tokens in an input-dependent way, and is key to their success across diverse applications in language and vision. However, a typical Transformer model…

We propose a novel attention model that can accurately attends to target objects of various scales and shapes in images. The model is trained to gradually suppress irrelevant regions in an input image via a progressive attentive process…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-08-08 Paul Hongsuck Seo , Zhe Lin , Scott Cohen , Xiaohui Shen , Bohyung Han

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

Semi-dense feature matching methods have been significantly advanced by leveraging attention mechanisms to extract discriminative descriptors. However, most existing approaches treat all pixels equally during attention computations, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Dongyue Li

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Over recent years, the Transformer has become a fundamental building block for sequence modeling architectures. Yet at its core is the use of self-attention, whose memory and computational cost grow quadratically with the sequence length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Qiuhao Zeng , Jerry Huang , Peng Lu , Gezheng Xu , Boxing Chen , Charles Ling , Boyu Wang

The transformer architecture predominates across various models. As the heart of the transformer, attention has a computational complexity of $O(N^2)$, compared to $O(N)$ for linear transformations. When handling large sequence lengths,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Jintao Zhang , Jia Wei , Haofeng Huang , Pengle Zhang , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

The advent of Transformers marked a significant breakthrough in sequence modelling, providing a highly performant architecture capable of leveraging GPU parallelism. However, Transformers are computationally expensive at inference time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Leo Feng , Frederick Tung , Hossein Hajimirsadeghi , Mohamed Osama Ahmed , Yoshua Bengio , Greg Mori

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

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

The per-token cost of transformer inference scales with context length, preventing its application to lifelong in-context learning. Linear attention is an efficient alternative that maintains a constant memory footprint, even on infinite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Luke McDermott , Robert W. Heath , Rahul Parhi