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We propose Lizard, a linearization framework that transforms pretrained Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) into subquadratic architectures. Transformers faces severe computational and memory bottlenecks with long sequences due…

The most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) models today are Transformers employing self-attention. In its standard form, self-attention incurs costs that increase with context length, driving demand for storage, compute, and energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Franz A. Heinsen , Leo Kozachkov

Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Nirmal Patel , Nilesh Gupta , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

The whole-brain connectome of a fruit fly comprises over 130K neurons connected with a probability of merely 0.02%, yet achieves an average shortest path of only 4.4 hops. Despite being highly structured at the circuit level, the network's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Zehao Jin , Yanan Sui

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zhen Cheng , Hao-Bo Yang , Wan-Yi Huang , Jin-Long Li

Vision-language models (VLMs) show remarkable performance in multimodal tasks. However, excessively long multimodal inputs lead to oversized Key-Value (KV) caches, resulting in significant memory consumption and I/O bottlenecks. Previous KV…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Zunhai Su , Wang Shen , Linge Li , Zhe Chen , Hanyu Wei , Huangqi Yu , Kehong Yuan

Long-term memory is a cornerstone of human intelligence. Enabling AI to process lifetime-scale information remains a long-standing pursuit in the field. Due to the constraints of full-attention architectures, the effective context length of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Yu Chen , Runkai Chen , Sheng Yi , Xinda Zhao , Xiaohong Li , Jianjin Zhang , Jun Sun , Chuanrui Hu , Yunyun Han , Lidong Bing , Yafeng Deng , Tianqiao Chen

The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Andreas Dengel

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have become essential backbones of modern multimodal intelligence, yet their outputs remain prone to hallucination-plausible text misaligned with visual inputs. Existing alignment approaches often rely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Kejia Chen , Jiawen Zhang , Jiacong Hu , Kewei Gao , Jian Lou , Zunlei Feng , Mingli Song

Softmax Attention has a quadratic time complexity in sequence length, which becomes prohibitive to run at long contexts, even with highly optimized GPU kernels. For example, FlashAttention-2/3 (exact, GPU-optimized implementations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sahil Joshi , Agniva Chowdhury , Amar Kanakamedala , Ekam Singh , Evan Tu , Anshumali Shrivastava

Linear attention significantly reduces the computational complexity of Transformers from quadratic to linear, yet it consistently lags behind softmax-based attention in performance. We identify the root cause of this degradation as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Weikang Meng , Liangyu Huo , Yadan Luo , Yaowei Wang , Yingjian Li , Zheng Zhang

Key-value (KV) caching plays an essential role in accelerating decoding for transformer-based autoregressive large language models (LLMs). However, the amount of memory required to store the KV cache can become prohibitive at long sequence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-22 William Brandon , Mayank Mishra , Aniruddha Nrusimha , Rameswar Panda , Jonathan Ragan Kelly

Vision Transformers (ViT) have shown their competitive advantages performance-wise compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) though they often come with high computational costs. To this end, previous methods explore different…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Cong Wei , Brendan Duke , Ruowei Jiang , Parham Aarabi , Graham W. Taylor , Florian Shkurti

Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Dustin Wang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Steven Abreu , Yong Shan , Taylor Kergan , Yuqi Pan , Yuhong Chou , Zheng Li , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Jason Eshraghian

Transformers and deep state space models (SSMs) sit at opposite ends of a basic design choice: attention routes each query through a growing key-value (KV) cache by content-based matching at quadratic cost, while deep SSMs compress context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Naoki Kiyohara , Harrison Bo Hua Zhu , Riccardo El Hassanin , Zhuo Sun , Wenlong Chen , Samir Bhatt , Yingzhen Li

Autoregressive models with continuous tokens form a promising paradigm for visual generation, especially for text-to-image (T2I) synthesis, but they suffer from high computational cost. We study how to design compute-efficient linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Jiahao Wang , Ting Pan , Haoge Deng , Dongchen Han , Taiqiang Wu , Xinlong Wang , Ping Luo

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang

Local-global attention models have recently emerged as compelling alternatives to standard Transformers, promising improvements in both training and inference efficiency. However, the crucial choice of window size presents a Pareto…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Bailin Wang , Chang Lan , Chong Wang , Ruoming Pang

Attention is a core operation in large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). We present BD Attention (BDA), the first lossless algorithmic reformulation of attention. BDA is enabled by a simple matrix identity from Basis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jialin Zhao