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We propose a simple pairwise Sigmoid loss for Language-Image Pre-training (SigLIP). Unlike standard contrastive learning with softmax normalization, the sigmoid loss operates solely on image-text pairs and does not require a global view of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-28 Xiaohua Zhai , Basil Mustafa , Alexander Kolesnikov , Lucas Beyer

Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yu Zhang , Songlin Yang , Ruijie Zhu , Yue Zhang , Leyang Cui , Yiqiao Wang , Bolun Wang , Freda Shi , Bailin Wang , Wei Bi , Peng Zhou , Guohong Fu

Transformers have significantly advanced AI and machine learning through their powerful attention mechanism. However, computing attention on long sequences can become a computational bottleneck. FlashAttention mitigates this by fusing the…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kosmas Alexandridis , Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos

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

Transformer are widely used in various fields such as natural language processing and computer vision. However, the training time for large Transformer models can be challenging due to the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism. Especially as…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Youxuan Xu , Tong Wu , Shigang Li , Xueying Wang , Jingjing Wang

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention to $\mathcal{O}(T)$, but its memory state grows as $\mathcal{O}(T)$ in Frobenius norm, causing progressive interference between stored associations. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Vishal Pandey , Gopal Singh

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

We present core attention disaggregation (CAD), a technique that improves long-context large language model training by decoupling the core attention computation, softmax(QK^T)V, from the rest of the model and executing it on a separate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yonghao Zhuang , Junda Chen , Bo Pang , Yi Gu , Yibo Zhu , Yimin Jiang , Ion Stoica , Eric Xing , Hao Zhang

Large language model inference on Central Processing Units (CPU) is challenging due to the vast quantities of expensive Multiply-Add (MAD) matrix operations in the attention computations. In this paper, we argue that there is a rare gem in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Tianyi Zhang , Jonah Wonkyu Yi , Bowen Yao , Zhaozhuo Xu , Anshumali Shrivastava

The computational cost of softmax-based attention in transformers limits their applicability to long-context tasks. Adaptive sparsity, of which $\alpha$-entmax attention is an example, offers a flexible data-dependent alternative, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Nuno Gonçalves , Marcos Treviso , André F. T. Martins

The Transformer is an extremely powerful and prominent deep learning architecture. In this work, we challenge the commonly held belief in deep learning that going deeper is better, and show an alternative design approach that is building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins

Deep video recognition is more computationally expensive than image recognition, especially on large-scale datasets like Kinetics [1]. Therefore, training scalability is essential to handle a large amount of videos. In this paper, we study…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Ji Lin , Chuang Gan , Song Han

We present Rapid Attention Distillation to Linear Attention Decoders at Scale (RADLADS), a protocol for rapidly converting softmax attention transformers into linear attention decoder models, along with two new RWKV-variant architectures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-23 Daniel Goldstein , Eric Alcaide , Janna Lu , Eugene Cheah

Recently, it has been argued that encoder-decoder models can be made more interpretable by replacing the softmax function in the attention with its sparse variants. In this work, we introduce a novel, simple method for achieving sparsity in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-07 Biao Zhang , Ivan Titov , Rico Sennrich

The quadratic complexity and weak length extrapolation of Transformers limits their ability to scale to long sequences, and while sub-quadratic solutions like linear attention and state space models exist, they empirically underperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Xuezhe Ma , Xiaomeng Yang , Wenhan Xiong , Beidi Chen , Lili Yu , Hao Zhang , Jonathan May , Luke Zettlemoyer , Omer Levy , Chunting Zhou

Doubly-stochastic attention has emerged as a transport-based alternative to row-softmax attention, with recent Transformer variants using it to reduce attention sinks and rank collapse while improving performance. In this family, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Huy Tran , Max Milkert , David Hyde

This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hemanth Saratchandran , Jianqiao Zheng , Yiping Ji , Wenbo Zhang , Simon Lucey

Diffusion transformer-based video generation models (DiTs) have recently attracted widespread attention for their excellent generation quality. However, their computational cost remains a major bottleneck-attention alone accounts for over…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Xuan Shen , Chenxia Han , Yufa Zhou , Yanyue Xie , Yifan Gong , Quanyi Wang , Yiwei Wang , Yanzhi Wang , Pu Zhao , Jiuxiang Gu