arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Quadratic Attention: Separable Gaussian Operators for ODE Vision Transformers

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Your Transformer Is Secretly Elastic

The paper presents a retraining‑free technique that transforms pre‑trained transformers into elastic models capable of adapting to any computational budget on the fly. By jointly ranking every MLP neuron and attention head on a common scale and applying soft pruning across multiple sparsity targets, the method achieves smooth performance degradation up to 60% sparsity while outperforming one‑shot baselines. Experiments on 27 vision and text transformer encoders show significant parameter reductions with minimal accuracy loss and notable throughput and latency gains on GPUs, all produced in minutes.

By Walter Simoncini, Dheeraj Varghese, Gertjan J. Burghouts, Cees G. M. Snoek
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Cubit: Token Mixer with Kernel Ridge Regression

The paper introduces Cubit, a Transformer‑style architecture that replaces the standard attention mechanism with Kernel Ridge Regression (KRR). By interpreting attention as Nadaraya‑Watson regression, Cubit incorporates the closed‑form KRR solution, combining kernel‑based value aggregation with normalization via the inverse kernel matrix. The authors also propose a Limited‑Range Rescale (LRR) to stabilize training and report that Cubit shows improved long‑sequence modeling, with gains increasing as training sequence length grows.

By Chuanyang Zheng, Jiankai Sun, Yihang Gao, Yuehao Wang, Liangchen Tan, Mac Schwager, Anderson Schneider, Yuriy Nevmyvaka, Xiaodong Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Full-bandwidth transformer

arXiv:2608. 08888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive transformers compute along two axes: horizontally across generated tokens, and vertically through model depth.

By Xi Wang, Ziyang Cai, Zheng Zhan, Harry Dong, Ying Fan, Gustavo de Rosa, Tim Pearce, John Langford
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 17

SQuad: Sub-Quadratic Attention Distillation for Efficient Video Generation

Video Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) spend most of their compute inside the Self-Attention operation, whose cost grows quadratically, $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$, with the number of latent tokens $n$. For the task of video generation, the token count is large, so this term dominates runtime and memory, and thereby caps the resolution and duration we can generate.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Successive Capacity Growth: Task-Complexity-Driven Width and Depth Expansion for Vision Transformer Encoders in JEPA World Models

The paper introduces Successive Capacity Growth (SCG), a method for adaptively expanding Vision Transformer encoders in Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs). SCG starts with a minimal encoder and incrementally increases width or depth based on a task‑agnostic test‑and‑verify mechanism, while a Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) keeps learned semantic dimensions independent. Experiments on multi‑object dynamics and 2D navigation tasks show that SCG achieves up to 20.3% better prediction loss than fixed small baselines and 23% better than fixed large models, with far greater parameter efficiency and no false‑positive expansions.

By Frederik Berenz
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Scaling Parallel Sequence Models to Foundation-Scale Vision Encoders

arXiv:2606. 00746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision foundation models are bottlenecked by the quadratic cost of self-attention, which limits usable resolution and increases the cost of large-scale pretraining.

By Yitong Jiang, Hongjun Wang, Collin McCarthy, Hanrong Ye, David Wehr, Xinhao Li, Qi Dou, Tianfan Xue, Ka Chun Cheung, Simon See, Wonmin Byeon, Ke Chen, Kai Han, Jinwei Gu, Hongxu Yin, Pavlo Molchanov, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu