REVIEW 7 cited by
Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.
This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.
SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event
T0 review · schema-true
One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.
pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp
cosFormer: Rethinking Softmax in Attention
read the original abstract
Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the quadratic space and time complexity to the sequence length. Kernel methods are often adopted to reduce the complexity by approximating the softmax operator. Nevertheless, due to the approximation errors, their performances vary in different tasks/corpus and suffer crucial performance drops when compared with the vanilla softmax attention. In this paper, we propose a linear transformer called cosFormer that can achieve comparable or better accuracy to the vanilla transformer in both casual and cross attentions. cosFormer is based on two key properties of softmax attention: i). non-negativeness of the attention matrix; ii). a non-linear re-weighting scheme that can concentrate the distribution of the attention matrix. As its linear substitute, cosFormer fulfills these properties with a linear operator and a cosine-based distance re-weighting mechanism. Extensive experiments on language modeling and text understanding tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We further examine our method on long sequences and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Long-Range Arena benchmark. The source code is available at https://github.com/OpenNLPLab/cosFormer.
Forward citations
Cited by 7 Pith papers
-
RACE Attention: A Strictly Linear-Time Attention Layer for Training on Outrageously Large Contexts
RACE Attention is a strictly linear-time attention mechanism that approximates softmax attention outputs using Gaussian projections and soft LSH to enable training on contexts up to 12 million tokens.
-
The Key to Going Linear: Analysis-Driven Transformer Linearization
Delta-rule linear attention faithfully approximates softmax attention through key-dependent rank-1 projections, enabling efficient post-hoc linearization of LLMs up to 32B parameters.
-
Blurry Window Attention
Blurry Window Attention stores a frequency window and reconstructs blurry KV history via Dirichlet kernel interpolation, achieving 8x better state efficiency than sliding window attention on the MQAR synthetic task.
-
Scaling Parallel Sequence Models to Foundation-Scale Vision Encoders
C-GSPN scales 2D spatial propagation to foundation vision encoders via a fast CUDA kernel, compressed blocks, and two-stage distillation, matching ViT performance with 15% fewer parameters and 4x block speedup at 2K r...
-
MICA: Multivariate Infini Compressive Attention for Time Series Forecasting
MICA adds linearly scaling compressive cross-channel attention to Transformers, cutting average forecast error by 5.4% and ranking first among multivariate baselines.
-
MICA: Multivariate Infini Compressive Attention for Time Series Forecasting
MICA adapts infini compressive attention to the channel dimension, enabling scalable cross-channel dependencies in Transformers and cutting forecast error by 5.4% on average versus channel-independent baselines.
-
Attention to Mamba: A Recipe for Cross-Architecture Distillation
A two-stage distillation recipe converts a Pythia-1B Transformer into a Mamba model that preserves performance with perplexity 14.11 versus the teacher's 13.86.
discussion (0)
Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.