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Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…
Large Vision Language Models show impressive performance across image and video understanding tasks, yet their computational cost grows rapidly with the number of visual tokens. Existing token pruning methods mitigate this issue through…
We propose a new attention mechanism with linear complexity, ATP, that fixates \textbf{A}ttention on \textbf{T}op \textbf{P}rincipal keys, rather than on each individual token. Particularly, ATP is driven by an important observation that…
Despite their power, Transformers face challenges with long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. To address this limitation, methods like $k$-Nearest-Neighbor ($k$NN) attention have been introduced [Roy, Saffar,…
Attention mechanisms and non-local mean operations in general are key ingredients in many state-of-the-art deep learning techniques. In particular, the Transformer model based on multi-head self-attention has recently achieved great success…
Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the…
In the classical transformer attention scheme, we are given three $n \times d$ size matrices $Q, K, V$ (the query, key, and value tokens), and the goal is to compute a new $n \times d$ size matrix $D^{-1} \exp(QK^\top) V$ where $D =…
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…
Attention mechanisms have been extensively employed in various applications, including time series modeling, owing to their capacity to capture intricate dependencies; however, their utility is often constrained by quadratic computational…
We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical…
At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…
We study conditions under which transformers using soft attention can simulate hard attention, that is, effectively focus all attention on a subset of positions. First, we examine several subclasses of languages recognized by hard-attention…
The quadratic cost of attention in transformers motivated the development of efficient approaches: namely sparse and sliding window attention, convolutions and linear attention. Although these approaches result in impressive reductions in…
Multimodal learning models have become increasingly important as they surpass single-modality approaches on diverse tasks ranging from question-answering to autonomous driving. Despite the importance of multimodal learning, existing efforts…
Large language models (LLMs) represent a groundbreaking advancement in the domain of natural language processing due to their impressive reasoning abilities. Recently, there has been considerable interest in increasing the context lengths…
The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…
Current high-resolution vision-language models encode images as high-resolution image tokens and exhaustively take all these tokens to compute attention, which significantly increases the computational cost. To address this problem, we…
The quadratic cost of softmax attention limits Transformer scalability in high-resolution vision. We introduce Infinite Self-Attention (InfSA), a spectral reformulation that treats each attention layer as a diffusion step on a…
Scaling attention faces a critical bottleneck: the $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ quadratic computational cost of softmax attention, which limits its application in long-sequence domains. While linear attention mechanisms reduce this cost to…
We introduce Performers, Transformer architectures which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on…