| Challenge: | Existing linear transformers suffer from performance degradations on various tasks and corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a new linear attention that replaces scaling with a normalization to stabilize gradients and confine attention to neighbouring tokens in early layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla transformers on the long-range arena benchmark while being significantly more space-time efficient. |
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| Challenge: | a large computational cost for attention computation in large language models is a major obstacle . |
| Approach: | They propose a convolution-like structure for attention computation using convolution matrices . they then propose an efficient approximation method to approximate the attention matrix . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves nearly linear time complexity in n1+o(1) time. |
Efficient Long-Range Transformers: You Need to Attend More, but Not Necessarily at Every Layer (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer variant with mixed attention spans that leverages the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve competitive performance to models with full attention while reducing computational cost (75%) |
Adaptive Attention Span in Transformers (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | We extend the maximum context size of a neural network called Transformer to 8k characters. |
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Saturated Transformers are Constant-Depth Threshold Circuits (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that transformers with hard attention are limited in power, but hard attention is a strong assumption. |
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The NLP Task Effectiveness of Long-Range Transformers (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on long-range attention models have not been sufficient to develop efficient Transformers and their practical application on complex NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark 7 Transformer variants on 5 difficult NLP tasks and 7 datasets to examine their capacity for long-range attention. |
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Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Transformers into Decaying Fast Weights (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive Transformers incur O(T) complexity during per-token generation due to the self-attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a kernel-based method to approximate causal self-attention by replacing it with recurrent formulations with various update rules and feature maps to achieve O(1) time and memory complexity. |
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How to Dissect a Muppet: The Structure of Transformer Embedding Spaces (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained embeddings based on the Transformer architecture have taken the NLP community by storm . a novel decomposition of Transformer output embeddables is demonstrated . |
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Token-Wise Kernels (TWiKers) for Vicinity-Aware Attention in Transformers (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Token-Wise Kernels (TWiKers) are a novel enhancement to transformers that learn token-specific convolutional kernels applied to the keys or values. |
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ReGLA: Refining Gated Linear Attention (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their computational and storage requirements due to the quadratic computation complexity of softmax attention. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce the quadratic computation complexity of softmax attention by using feature maps, normalization and the gating mechanism to improve performance. |
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Transformer Grammars: Augmenting Transformer Language Models with Syntactic Inductive Biases at Scale (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel class of Transformer language models that combine expressive power, scalability, and strong performance of Transformers and recursive syntactic compositions. |
| Approach: | They introduce Transformer Grammars, a class of Transformer language models that combine expressive power and recursive syntactic compositions. |
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