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Related papers: Exact Linear Attention

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The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…

Balancing accuracy and latency on high-resolution images is a critical challenge for lightweight models, particularly for Transformer-based architectures that often suffer from excessive latency. To address this issue, we introduce…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Junzhou Li , Manqi Zhao , Yilin Gao , Zhiheng Yu , Yin Li , Dongsheng Jiang , Li Xiao

Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

The Softmax attention mechanism in Transformer models is notoriously computationally expensive, particularly due to its quadratic complexity, posing significant challenges in vision applications. In contrast, linear attention provides a far…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Qihang Fan , Huaibo Huang , Ran He

This paper proposes a Learnable Multiplicative absolute position Embedding based Conformer (LMEC). It contains a kernelized linear attention (LA) module called LMLA to solve the time-consuming problem for long sequence speech recognition as…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-12-06 Yuguang Yang , Yu Pan , Jingjing Yin , Heng Lu

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Qinglin Zhang , Siqi Zheng , Shiliang Zhang , Chong Deng , Hai Yu , Jiaqing Liu , Yukun Ma , Chong Zhang

Linear attention is an efficient attention mechanism that has recently emerged as a promising alternative to conventional softmax attention. With its ability to process tokens in linear computational complexities, linear attention, in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Zhen Qin , Weigao Sun , Dong Li , Xuyang Shen , Weixuan Sun , Yiran Zhong

Attention mechanisms have significantly advanced visual models by capturing global context effectively. However, their reliance on large-scale datasets and substantial computational resources poses challenges in data-scarce and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Chenghao Li , Chaoning Zhang , Boheng Zeng , Yi Lu , Pengbo Shi , Qingzi Chen , Jirui Liu , Lingyun Zhu , Yang Yang , Heng Tao Shen

Transformers and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning, with attention mechanisms at the core of their success. As the landscape of attention variants expands, so too do the challenges of optimizing their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Feiyang Chen , Yu Cheng , Lei Wang , Yuqing Xia , Ziming Miao , Lingxiao Ma , Fan Yang , Jilong Xue , Zhi Yang , Mao Yang , Haibo Chen

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

Various linear complexity models, such as Linear Transformer (LinFormer), State Space Model (SSM), and Linear RNN (LinRNN), have been proposed to replace the conventional softmax attention in Transformer structures. However, the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Yuhong Chou , Man Yao , Kexin Wang , Yuqi Pan , Ruijie Zhu , Yiran Zhong , Yu Qiao , Jibin Wu , Bo Xu , Guoqi Li

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

Linear attention has emerged as a promising alternative to softmax-based attention, leveraging kernelized feature maps to reduce complexity from quadratic to linear in sequence length. However, the non-negative constraint on feature maps…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Weikang Meng , Yadan Luo , Xin Li , Dongmei Jiang , Zheng Zhang

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

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:…

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Linear transformers aim to reduce the quadratic space-time complexity of vanilla transformers. However, they usually suffer from degraded performances on various tasks and corpus. In this paper, we examine existing kernel-based linear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Zhen Qin , XiaoDong Han , Weixuan Sun , Dongxu Li , Lingpeng Kong , Nick Barnes , Yiran Zhong

Reducing the key-value (KV) cache size is a crucial step toward enabling efficient inference in large language models (LLMs), especially under latency and memory constraints. While Multi-Head Attention (MHA) offers strong representational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zhengge Cai , Haowen Hou

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

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