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The Segment Anything Model (SAM) has advanced interactive segmentation but is limited by the high computational cost on high-resolution images. This requires downsampling to meet GPU constraints, sacrificing the fine-grained details needed…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-26 You Huang , Wenbin Lai , Jiayi Ji , Liujuan Cao , Shengchuan Zhang , Rongrong Ji

We consider the problem of Visual Question Answering (VQA). Given an image and a free-form, open-ended, question, expressed in natural language, the goal of VQA system is to provide accurate answer to this question with respect to the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Tanzila Rahman , Shih-Han Chou , Leonid Sigal , Giuseppe Carenini

Vision transformers have shown great success on numerous computer vision tasks. However, its central component, softmax attention, prohibits vision transformers from scaling up to high-resolution images, due to both the computational…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Hui Deng , Jianyuan Wang , Yi Zhang , Kaihao Zhang , Nick Barnes , Stan Birchfield , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong

We propose novel attention architectures, Multi-matrix Factorization Attention (MFA) and MFA-Key-Reuse (MFA-KR). Existing variants for standard Multi-Head Attention (MHA), including SOTA methods like MLA, fail to maintain as strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Jingcheng Hu , Houyi Li , Yinmin Zhang , Zili Wang , Shuigeng Zhou , Xiangyu Zhang , Heung-Yeung Shum , Daxin Jiang

LLM decoding is bottlenecked for large batches and long contexts by loading the key-value (KV) cache from high-bandwidth memory, which inflates per-token latency, while the sequential nature of decoding limits parallelism. We analyze the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Ted Zadouri , Hubert Strauss , Tri Dao

The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Shawn Tan , Songlin Yang , Aaron Courville , Rameswar Panda , Yikang Shen

Transformer networks are rapidly becoming SotA in many fields, such as NLP and CV. Similarly to CNN, there is a strong push for deploying Transformer models at the extreme edge, ultimately fitting the tiny power budget and memory footprint…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-05 Victor J. B. Jung , Alessio Burrello , Moritz Scherer , Francesco Conti , Luca Benini

Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Zihan Qiu , Zekun Wang , Bo Zheng , Zeyu Huang , Kaiyue Wen , Songlin Yang , Rui Men , Le Yu , Fei Huang , Suozhi Huang , Dayiheng Liu , Jingren Zhou , Junyang Lin

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, improves the efficiency of large language models by projecting query, key, and value tensors into a compact latent space. This architectural change reduces the KV-cache size and…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Robin Geens , Marian Verhelst

While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yuan Cao , Dong Wang

Diffusion Transformers are fundamental for video and image generation, but their efficiency is bottlenecked by the quadratic complexity of attention. While block sparse attention accelerates computation by attending only critical key-value…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haopeng Li , Shitong Shao , Wenliang Zhong , Zikai Zhou , Lichen Bai , Hui Xiong , Zeke Xie

Attention calculation is extremely time-consuming for long-sequence inference tasks, such as text or image/video generation, in large models. To accelerate this process, we developed a low-precision, mathematically-equivalent algorithm…

This work focuses on an efficient Agile design methodology for domain-specific accelerators. We employ feature-by-feature enhancement of a vertical development stack and apply it to the TVM/VTA inference accelerator. We have enhanced the…

The efficiency of attention is important due to its quadratic time complexity. We enhance the efficiency of attention through two key contributions: First, we leverage the new FP4 Tensor Cores in Blackwell GPUs to accelerate attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Jintao Zhang , Jia Wei , Pengle Zhang , Xiaoming Xu , Haofeng Huang , Haoxu Wang , Kai Jiang , Jianfei Chen , Jun Zhu

Self-attention is at the heart of the popular Transformer architecture, yet suffers from quadratic time and memory complexity. The breakthrough FlashAttention algorithm revealed I/O complexity as the true bottleneck in scaling Transformers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Barna Saha , Christopher Ye

Long-context LLMs increasingly rely on extended, reusable prefill prompts for agents and domain Q&A, pushing attention and KV-cache to become the dominant decode-time bottlenecks. While sparse attention reduces computation and transfer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Chuxu Song , Zhencan Peng , Jiuqi Wei , Chuanhui Yang

Diffusion models excel in high-fidelity image generation but face scalability limits due to transformers' quadratic attention complexity. Plug-and-play token reduction methods like ToMeSD and ToFu reduce FLOPs by merging redundant tokens in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Wenbo Lu , Shaoyi Zheng , Yuxuan Xia , Shengjie Wang

The softmax function is crucial in Transformer attention, which normalizes each row of the attention scores with summation to one, achieving superior performances over other alternative functions. However, the softmax function can face a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chuanyang Zheng , Yihang Gao , Guoxuan Chen , Han Shi , Jing Xiong , Xiaozhe Ren , Chao Huang , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Yu Li

This paper proposes Block-Filtered Long-Context Attention (BFLA), a training-free sparse prefill attention mechanism for long-context inference. BFLA adopts a two-stage design. In Stage 1, query and key sequences are compressed into coarse…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-13 Chong Wu , Zhenan Feng , Renjie Xu , Houwang Zhang , Jiawang Cao , Maolin Che , Wenbo Zhu , Hong Yan

Transformer networks have emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for natural language processing tasks and are gaining popularity in other domains such as computer vision and audio processing. However, the efficient hardware acceleration…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Gamze İslamoğlu , Moritz Scherer , Gianna Paulin , Tim Fischer , Victor J. B. Jung , Angelo Garofalo , Luca Benini