Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12817 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866918376955183104 |
|---|---|
| author | Cao, Yuan Wang, Dong |
| author_facet | Cao, Yuan Wang, Dong |
| contents | While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when processing high-resolution images. Linear attention presents a promising alternative by reformulating the attention computation from $(QK)V$ to $Q(KV)$, thereby reducing the complexity from $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(N)$ while preserving the global receptive field. However, most existing methods compress historical key-value (KV) information uniformly, which can lead to feature redundancy and the loss of directional alignment with the query (Q). This uniform compression results in low-rank $KV$ feature maps, contributing to a performance gap compared to softmax attention. To mitigate this limitation, we propose \textbf{S}elective \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{GA}ting for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention (SAGA) , which introduces input-adaptive learnable gates to selectively modulate information aggregation into the $KV$ feature map. These gates enhance semantic diversity and alleviate the low-rank constraint inherent in conventional linear attention. Additionally, we propose an efficient Hadamard-product decomposition method for gate computation, which introduces no additional memory overhead. Experiments demonstrate that SAGA achieves a 1.76$\times$ improvement in throughput and a 2.69$\times$ reduction in peak GPU memory compared to PVT-T at a resolution of $1280 \times 1280$. Moreover, it improves top-1 accuracy by up to 4.4\% on the ImageNet dataset, demonstrating both computational efficiency and model effectiveness. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_12817 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | SAGA: Selective Adaptive Gating for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention Cao, Yuan Wang, Dong Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when processing high-resolution images. Linear attention presents a promising alternative by reformulating the attention computation from $(QK)V$ to $Q(KV)$, thereby reducing the complexity from $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(N)$ while preserving the global receptive field. However, most existing methods compress historical key-value (KV) information uniformly, which can lead to feature redundancy and the loss of directional alignment with the query (Q). This uniform compression results in low-rank $KV$ feature maps, contributing to a performance gap compared to softmax attention. To mitigate this limitation, we propose \textbf{S}elective \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{GA}ting for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention (SAGA) , which introduces input-adaptive learnable gates to selectively modulate information aggregation into the $KV$ feature map. These gates enhance semantic diversity and alleviate the low-rank constraint inherent in conventional linear attention. Additionally, we propose an efficient Hadamard-product decomposition method for gate computation, which introduces no additional memory overhead. Experiments demonstrate that SAGA achieves a 1.76$\times$ improvement in throughput and a 2.69$\times$ reduction in peak GPU memory compared to PVT-T at a resolution of $1280 \times 1280$. Moreover, it improves top-1 accuracy by up to 4.4\% on the ImageNet dataset, demonstrating both computational efficiency and model effectiveness. |
| title | SAGA: Selective Adaptive Gating for Efficient and Expressive Linear Attention |
| topic | Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12817 |