Linear-Time Global Visual Modeling without Explicit Attention
Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a novel perspective: we demonstrate that attention can be mathematically reframed as a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) equipped with dynamically predicted parameters. Through this lens, we explain attention's global modeling power not as explicit token-wise aggregation, but as an implicit process where dynamically generated parameters act as a compressed representation of the global context. Inspired by this insight, we investigate a fundamental question: can we achieve Transformer-level sequence global modeling entirely through dynamic parameterization while maintaining linear complexity, effectively replacing explicit attention? To explore this, we design various dynamic parameter prediction strategies and integrate them into standard network layers. Extensive empirical studies on vision models demonstrate that dynamic parameterization can indeed serve as a highly effective, linear-complexity alternative to explicit attention, opening new pathways for efficient sequence modeling. Code is available at https://github.com/LeapLabTHU/WeightFormer.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Parameter PredictionSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
ViG: Linear-complexity Visual Sequence Learning with Gated Linear Attention
Recently, linear complexity sequence modeling networks have achieved modeling capabilities similar to Vision Transformers on a variety of computer vision tasks, while using fewer FLOPs and less memory. However, their adv…
GPURepresentation LearningStar with Bilinear Mapping
Contextual modeling is crucial for robust visual representation learning, especially in computer vision. Although Transformers have become a leading architecture for vision tasks due to their attention mechanism, the…
Computational Efficiencyimage-classificationImage ClassificationRepresentation Learning+1Modeling Object Appearance Using Context-Conditioned Component Analysis
Subspace models have been very successful at modeling the appearance of structured image datasets when the visual objects have been aligned in the images (e.g., faces). Even with extensions that allow for global transfor…
Appearance TransferObjectCausal Image Modeling for Efficient Visual Understanding
In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis of causal image modeling and introduce the Adventurer series models where we treat images as sequences of patch tokens and employ uni-directional language models to learn…
Causal InferencePEBO-SLAM: Observer design for visual inertial SLAM with convergence guarantees
This paper introduces a new linear parameterization to the problem of visual inertial simultaneous localization and mapping (VI-SLAM) -- without any approximation -- for the case only using information from a single mono…
parameter estimationSimultaneous Localization and Mapping