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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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…