zlacker

>>fheins+(OP)
There's a graveyard of 100s of papers with "approximate near linear time attention."

They always hope the speed increase makes up for the lower quality, but it never does. The quadratic time seems inherent to the problem.

Indeed, there are lower bounds showing that sub n^2 algorithms can't work: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13214

>>thomas+Yc
The paper says that:

> In practice, we find that four Taylor terms (P = 4) suffice for recovering conventional attention with elementwise errors of approximately the same magnitude as Float16 resolution, acceptable for many AI applications.

ie., the claim is that this method reproduces the results of conventional attention, up to float16 numerical precision.