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Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Yifan Zhou , Zeqi Xiao , Tianyi Wei , Shuai Yang , Xingang Pan

We present Lightning Attention, the first linear attention implementation that maintains a constant training speed for various sequence lengths under fixed memory consumption. Due to the issue with cumulative summation operations (cumsum),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

Long-context ability, has become one of the most important iteration direction of next-generation Large Language Models, particularly in semantic understanding/reasoning, code agentic intelligence and recommendation system. However, the…

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently taken computer vision by storm. However, the softmax attention underlying ViTs comes with a quadratic complexity in time and memory, hindering the application of ViTs to high-resolution images. We…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Chuanyang Zheng

Many studies have been conducted to improve the efficiency of Transformer from quadric to linear. Among them, the low-rank-based methods aim to learn the projection matrices to compress the sequence length. However, the projection matrices…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Bosheng Qin , Juncheng Li , Siliang Tang , Yueting Zhuang

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Vision Transformers have achieved impressive performance in video classification, while suffering from the quadratic complexity caused by the Softmax attention mechanism. Some studies alleviate the computational costs by reducing the number…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Kaiyue Lu , Zexiang Liu , Jianyuan Wang , Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Hui Deng , Xiaodong Han , Yuchao Dai , Yiran Zhong

Large language models (LLMs) now support extremely long context windows, but the quadratic complexity of vanilla attention results in significantly long Time-to-First-Token (TTFT) latency. Existing approaches to address this complexity…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Qianchao Zhu , Jiangfei Duan , Chang Chen , Siran Liu , Guanyu Feng , Xin Lv , Xiao Chuanfu , Dahua Lin , Chao Yang

Random-feature-based attention (RFA) is an efficient approximation of softmax attention with linear runtime and space complexity. However, the approximation gap between RFA and conventional softmax attention is not well studied. Built upon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Lin Zheng , Jianbo Yuan , Chong Wang , Lingpeng Kong

Token pruning methods for Vision Transformers (ViTs) promise quadratic reductions in attention FLOPs by dropping uninformative patches. Yet standard variable-length attention APIs -- including FlashAttention-2's varlen and PyTorch's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Seifeldin Abdellatif , Ahmad Almasri

Visual token reduction lowers inference costs caused by extensive image features in large vision-language models (LVLMs). Unlike relevant studies that prune tokens in self-attention-only LVLMs, our work uniquely addresses…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jewon Lee , Ki-Ung Song , Seungmin Yang , Donguk Lim , Jaeyeon Kim , Wooksu Shin , Bo-Kyeong Kim , Yong Jae Lee , Tae-Ho Kim

Existing attention accelerators often trade exact softmax semantics, depend on fused Tensor Core kernels, or incur sequential depth that limits FP32 throughput on long sequences. We present \textbf{ELSA}, an algorithmic reformulation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Chih-Chung Hsu , Xin-Di Ma , Wo-Ting Liao , Chia-Ming Lee

Scaling Transformers to ultra-long contexts is bottlenecked by the $O(n^2 d)$ cost of self-attention. Existing methods reduce this cost along the sequence axis through local windows, kernel approximations, or token-level sparsity, but these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Yan Xie , Tiansheng Wen , Tangda Huang , Bo Chen , Chenyu You , Stefanie Jegelka , Yifei Wang

Language models struggle to generalize beyond pretraining context lengths, limiting long-horizon reasoning and retrieval. Continued pretraining on long-context data can help but is expensive due to the quadratic scaling of Attention. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Sakshi Choudhary , Aditya Chattopadhyay , Luca Zancato , Elvis Nunez , Matthew Trager , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Recent work has shown that training loss scales as a power law with both model size and the number of tokens, and that achieving compute-optimal models requires scaling model size and token count together. However, these scaling laws assume…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Aurko Roy , Timothy Chou , Sai Surya Duvvuri , Sijia Chen , Jiecao Yu , Xiaodong Wang , Manzil Zaheer , Rohan Anil

Conformer has shown a great success in automatic speech recognition (ASR) on many public benchmarks. One of its crucial drawbacks is the quadratic time-space complexity with respect to the input sequence length, which prohibits the model to…

Sound · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Jingyu Sun , Guiping Zhong , Dinghao Zhou , Baoxiang Li , Yiran Zhong

As the core operator of Transformers, Softmax Attention exhibits excellent global modeling capabilities. However, its quadratic complexity limits its applicability to vision tasks. In contrast, Linear Attention shares a similar formulation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Yuang Ai , Ran He

Recent advance in sparse attention mechanisms has demonstrated strong potential for reducing the computational cost of long-context training and inference in large language models (LLMs). Native Sparse Attention (NSA), one state-of-the-art…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Ran Yan , Youhe Jiang , Zhuoming Chen , Haohui Mai , Beidi Chen , Binhang Yuan

To address the increasing long-context compute limitations of softmax attention, several subquadratic recurrent operators have been developed. This work includes models such as Mamba-2, DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet (GDN), and Kimi Delta…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Neehal Tumma , Noel Loo , Daniela Rus

Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA), introduced in DeepSeek-V2, compresses key-value states into a low-rank latent vector, caching only this vector to reduce memory. In tensor parallelism (TP), however, attention heads are computed across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Xiaojuan Tang , Fanxu Meng , Pingzhi Tang , Yuxuan Wang , Di Yin , Xing Sun , Muhan Zhang