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The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

The quadratic computational complexity of softmax transformers has become a bottleneck in long-context scenarios. In contrast, linear attention model families provide a promising direction towards a more efficient sequential model. These…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Difan Deng , Andreas Bentzen Winje , Lukas Fehring , Marius Lindauer

We develop hybrid memory architectures for general-purpose sequence processing neural networks, that combine key-value memory using softmax attention (KV-memory) with fast weight memory through dynamic synaptic modulation (FW-memory) -- the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Kazuki Irie , Morris Yau , Samuel J. Gershman

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

Transformers excel at sequence modeling but face quadratic complexity, while linear attention offers improved efficiency but often compromises recall accuracy over long contexts. In this work, we introduce Native Hybrid Attention (NHA), a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Jusen Du , Jiaxi Hu , Tao Zhang , Weigao Sun , Yu Cheng

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…

Despite the advantageous subquadratic complexity of modern recurrent deep learning models -- such as state-space models (SSMs) -- recent studies have highlighted their potential shortcomings compared to transformers on reasoning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Destiny Okpekpe , Antonio Orvieto

Transformers serve as the foundation of most modern large language models. To mitigate the quadratic complexity of standard full attention, various efficient attention mechanisms, such as linear and hybrid attention, have been developed. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Xiaowei Ye , Xiaoyu He , Chao Liao , Chen Wu , Pinyan Lu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Simran Arora , Sabri Eyuboglu , Michael Zhang , Aman Timalsina , Silas Alberti , Dylan Zinsley , James Zou , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

Modeling long sequences of user behaviors has emerged as a critical frontier in generative recommendation. However, existing solutions face a dilemma: linear attention mechanisms achieve efficiency at the cost of retrieval precision due to…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Lei Xin , Yuhao Zheng , Ke Cheng , Changjiang Jiang , Zifan Zhang , Fanhu Zeng

Transformer models have been successful in various sequence processing tasks, but the self-attention mechanism's computational cost limits its practicality for long sequences. Although there are existing attention variants that improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Zicheng Liu , Li Wang , Siyuan Li , Zedong Wang , Haitao Lin , Stan Z. Li

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

We present a novel bi-directional Transformer architecture (BiXT) which scales linearly with input size in terms of computational cost and memory consumption, but does not suffer the drop in performance or limitation to only one input…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Markus Hiller , Krista A. Ehinger , Tom Drummond

Autoregressive (AR) video diffusion is a powerful paradigm for streaming and interactive video generation. However, its reliance on softmax self-attention leads to quadratic compute complexity in sequence length and memory usage due to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Kunyang Li , Mubarak Shah , Yuzhang Shang

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention. Yet there is no consensus on whether the potential…

The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Firas Khader , Omar S. M. El Nahhas , Tianyu Han , Gustav Müller-Franzes , Sven Nebelung , Jakob Nikolas Kather , Daniel Truhn

Efficient parallelization of Large Language Models (LLMs) with long sequences is essential but challenging due to their significant computational and memory demands, particularly stemming from communication bottlenecks in attention…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Zongwu Wang , Fangxin Liu , Mingshuai Li , Li Jiang

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) towards applications with ultra-long contexts faces challenges posed by the high computational and memory costs of the Transformer architecture. While existing sparse and linear attention…