In plain words: It breaks attention into factors so every token still connects to every other, but the computing and memory needed grow with the number of tokens instead of its square. Standard tests show solid performance compared with the usual full-attention approach.
Abstract · FAST: Factorizable Attention for Speeding up Transformers
Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the computational and memory complexity of the attention mechanism in transformers from $O(N^2)$ to $O(N)$. In comparison to previous attempts, our work presents a linearly scaled attention mechanism that maintains the full representation of the attention matrix without compromising on sparsification and incorporates the all-to-all relationship between tokens. We explore the properties of our new attention metric and conduct tests in various standard settings. Results indicate that our attention mechanism has a robust performance and holds significant promise for diverse applications where self-attention is used.
Armin Gerami, Monte Hoover, Pranav S. Dulepet, Ramani Duraiswami
arXiv:2402.07901 · cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NA · submitted Feb 12, 2024
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