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The quadratic cost of scaled dot-product attention is a central obstacle to scaling autoregressive language models to long contexts. Linear-time attention and State Space Models (SSMs) provide scalable alternatives but are typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yifan Zhang , Zhen Qin , Mengdi Wang , Quanquan Gu

Large language models (LLMs) face significant challenges in processing long contexts due to the linear growth of the key-value (KV) cache and quadratic complexity of self-attention. Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Zeng You , Yaofo Chen , Qiuwu Chen , Ying Sun , Shuhai Zhang , Yingjian Li , Yaowei Wang , Mingkui Tan

Long-context language modeling remains central to modern sequence modeling, but the quadratic cost of Transformer attention makes scaling computationally prohibitive. Linear recurrent models address this bottleneck by compressing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jiaxuan Zou , Ruifeng Ren , Yong Liu

In Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models, particularly for video generation, attention latency is a major bottleneck due to the long sequence length and the quadratic complexity. We find that attention weights can be separated into two parts:…

Converting pretrained attention modules such as grouped-query attention (GQA) into multi-head latent attention (MLA) can improve expressivity without increasing KV-cache cost, making it attractive for efficient inference. However, many…

In this work, we conduct a systematic analysis of Native Sparse Attention (NSA) and propose targeted improvements that enhance long-context modeling. A key insight is that alternating between local (sliding-window) and global (compression,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yuxuan Hu , Jianchao Tan , Jiaqi Zhang , Wen Zan , Pingwei Sun , Yifan Lu , Yerui Sun , Yuchen Xie , Xunliang Cai , Jing Zhang

Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Jiaxu Liu , Yuhe Bai , Xiangyu Yin , Christos-Savvas Bouganis

Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Xiaoran Liu , Siyang He , Qiqi Wang , Ruixiao Li , Yuerong Song , Zhigeng Liu , Linlin Li , Qun Liu , Zengfeng Huang , Qipeng Guo , Ziwei He , Xipeng Qiu

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 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

Standard softmax self-attention excels in vision tasks but incurs quadratic complexity O(N^2), limiting high-resolution deployment. Linear attention reduces the cost to O(N), yet its compressed state representations can impair modeling…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ruibang Li , Guan Luo , Yiwei Zhang , Jin Gao , Bing Li , Weiming Hu

Linear Attention (LA) offers a promising paradigm for scaling large language models (LLMs) to long sequences by avoiding the quadratic complexity of self-attention. Recent LA models such as Mamba2 and GDN interpret linear recurrences as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yulong Huang , Xiang Liu , Hongxiang Huang , Xiaopeng Lin , Zunchang Liu , Xiaowen Chu , Zeke Xie , Bojun Cheng

Transformer models are computationally costly on long sequences since regular attention has quadratic $O(n^2)$ time complexity. We introduce Wavelet-Enhanced Random Spectral Attention (WERSA), a novel mechanism of linear $O(n)$ time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Vincenzo Dentamaro

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

While originally designed for natural language processing tasks, the self-attention mechanism has recently taken various computer vision areas by storm. However, the 2D nature of images brings three challenges for applying self-attention in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Meng-Hao Guo , Cheng-Ze Lu , Zheng-Ning Liu , Ming-Ming Cheng , Shi-Min Hu

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

Efficient attentions have greatly improved the computational efficiency of Transformers. However, most existing linear attention mechanisms suffer from an \emph{efficiency degradation} problem, leading to inefficiencies in causal language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Jun Zhang , Shuyang Jiang , Jiangtao Feng , Lin Zheng , Lingpeng Kong

The quadratic computational complexity of standard attention mechanisms presents a severe scalability bottleneck for LLMs in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention mechanisms combining Full Attention (FA) and Sparse Attention (SA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Quantong Qiu , Zhiyi Hong , Yi Yang , Haitian Wang , Kebin Liu , Qingqing Dang , Juntao Li , Min Zhang

We present the first comprehensive study of latent multi-head attention (MLA) for small language models, revealing interesting efficiency-quality trade-offs. Training 30M-parameter GPT models on 100,000 synthetic stories, we benchmark three…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sushant Mehta , Raj Dandekar , Rajat Dandekar , Sreedath Panat

Recently, random feature attentions (RFAs) are proposed to approximate the softmax attention in linear time and space complexity by linearizing the exponential kernel. In this paper, we first propose a novel perspective to understand the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Lin Zheng , Chong Wang , Lingpeng Kong