Efficient Attention Mechanisms in Transformers

The field of transformer research is moving towards developing more efficient attention mechanisms to improve scalability. Recent work has focused on reducing the quadratic time complexity of traditional attention mechanisms, exploring alternatives such as approximate nearest neighbor attention and multipole semantic attention. These innovations have led to significant improvements in computational efficiency, enabling the application of transformers to larger and more complex tasks. Notably, some papers have introduced new attention mechanisms that can simulate massively parallel computation algorithms, while others have developed methods to reduce the complexity of attention computations. Noteworthy papers include: Fast attention mechanisms: a tale of parallelism, which introduces an efficient attention mechanism called Approximate Nearest Neighbor Attention with sub-quadratic time complexity. Multipole Semantic Attention: A Fast Approximation of Softmax Attention for Pretraining, which presents an efficient approximation of softmax attention that combines semantic clustering with multipole expansions from computational physics. SAGA: Selective Adaptive Gating for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention, which proposes a selective adaptive gating mechanism to enhance semantic diversity and alleviate the low-rank constraint inherent in conventional linear attention.

Sources

Fast attention mechanisms: a tale of parallelism

Semi-interval Comparison Constraints in Query Containment and Their Impact on Certain Answer Computation

Constant Time with Minimal Preprocessing, a Robust and Extensive Complexity Class

Multipole Semantic Attention: A Fast Approximation of Softmax Attention for Pretraining

SAGA: Selective Adaptive Gating for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention

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