Cost-Effective Attention Mechanisms for Low Resource Settings: Necessity & Sufficiency of Linear Transformations

Abstract

From natural language processing to vision, Scaled Dot Product Attention (SDPA) is the backbone of most modern deep learning applications. Unfortunately, its memory and computational requirements can be prohibitive in low-resource settings. In this paper, we improve its efficiency without sacrificing its versatility. We propose three attention variants where we remove consecutive linear transformations or add a novel one, and evaluate them on a range of standard NLP and vision tasks. Our proposed models are substantially lighter than standard SDPA (and have 25-50% fewer parameters). We show that the performance cost of these changes is negligible relative to size reduction and that in one case (Super Attention) we succeed in outperforming SDPA by up to 10% while improving its speed and reducing its parameters by 25%.