CAT: Circular-Convolutional Attention for Sub-Quadratic Transformers

Transformers have driven remarkable breakthroughs in natural language processing and computer vision, yet their standard attention mechanism still imposes $O(N^2)$ complexity, hindering scalability to longer sequences.

We introduce Circular-convolutional ATtention (CAT), a Fourier-based approach that efficiently applies circular convolutions to reduce complexity without sacrificing representational power. CAT achieves $O(N\log N)$ computations, requires fewer learnable parameters by streamlining fully connected layers, and introduces no heavier operations, resulting in consistent accuracy improvements and about a 10% speedup in naive PyTorch implementations.

Based on the engineering-isomorphic transformer framework, CAT's design not only offers practical efficiency and ease of implementation, but also provides insights to guide the development of future high-performance Transformer architectures.

Finally, our ablation studies highlight the key conditions underlying CAT’s success, shedding light on broader principles for scalable attention mechanisms.