Skip to yearly menu bar Skip to main content


Poster

Linear Log-Normal Attention with Unbiased Concentration

Yury Nahshan · Joseph Kampeas · Emir Haleva

Halle B #42
[ ] [ Project Page ]
Wed 8 May 1:45 a.m. PDT — 3:45 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This limitation poses a substantial obstacle when dealing with long documents or high-resolution images. In this work, we study the self-attention mechanism by analyzing the distribution of the attention matrix and its concentration ability. Furthermore, we propose instruments to measure these quantities and introduce a novel self-attention mechanism, Linear Log-Normal Attention, designed to emulate the distribution and concentration behavior of the original self-attention. Our experimental results on popular natural language benchmarks reveal that our proposed Linear Log-Normal Attention outperforms other linearized attention alternatives, offering a promising avenue for enhancing the scalability of transformer models.

Chat is not available.