arXiv Machine Learning

Towards Tight Bounds for Streaming Attention

arXiv:2606. 07205v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The attention mechanism is a cornerstone of modern transformer architectures.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Length Generalization for Transformers via Compression

arXiv:2609.08851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in transformer length generalization theory enable us to reliably predict when a transformer can learn to solve a task. In particul...

By Georg Zetzsche, Hongjian Jiang, Andy Yang, Pascal Bergstr\"a{\ss}er, Marco S\"alzer, David Chiang, Anthony W. Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

Efficiently Approximating Attention Is Hard

arXiv:2609.37261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Softmax attention is ubiquitous in modern machine learning, but its quadratic scaling with sequence length makes it costly. To reduce this cost, attent...

By Lukas Haverbeck, Carmen Amo Alonso, Andres Felipe Posada-Moreno, Sebastian Trimpe, Marco Pavone
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

SPHERICAL KV: Angle-Domain Attention and Rate-Distortion Retention for Efficient Long-Context Inference

arXiv:2605. 18856v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-context inference is increasingly constrained by the KV cache: resident memory grows with context length, and decoding becomes limited by repeated High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) streaming rather than arithmetic.

By Anay Chauhan, Gurucharan Marthi Krishna Kumar, Arion Das, Amit Dhanda, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Amitava Das
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Structured Transforms for Low-Overhead Quantization of Language Models

The paper revisits Kashin‑decomposition‑based weight quantization for large language models, introducing an improved algorithm that uses a sign‑randomized Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) instead of a dense random orthogonal matrix. This change reduces per‑iteration cost from ≠(N^2) to ≠(N log N) and, combined with a greedy alternating‑update scheme, guarantees the four‑peak distribution needed for stable 2‑bit clustering while eliminating the need for multi‑restart k‑means. The resulting JAX pipeline, when paired with OPTQ‑style error compensation and QuIP‑style incoherence preprocessing, competes with state‑of‑the‑art quantization methods on OPT, Llama‑2, and Pythia at 4‑bit per channel, and remains numerically stable under stress configurations that cause other methods to diverge.

By Daria Cherniuk, Alexander Rudikov, Boris Kashin, Ivan Oseledets