arXiv:2505.21535v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: While transformers dominate modern vision and language models, their attention mechanism remains poorly suited for in-memory computing (IMC) devices due to intensive activation-to-activation multiplications and non-local memory access, leading to substantial latency and bandwidth overhead on ReRAM-based accelerators. To address this mismatch, we propose FAR, a Function-preserving Attention Replacement framework that substitutes all attention in pretrained DeiTs with sequential modules inherently compatible with IMC dataflows. Specifically, FAR replaces self-attention with a multi-head bidirectional LSTM architecture via block-wise distillation to retain functional equivalence while enabling linear-time computation and localized weight reuse. We further incorporate structured pruning on FAR models, enabling flexible adaptation to resource-constrained IMC arrays while maintaining functional fidelity. Evaluations on the DeiT family demonstrate that FAR maintains comparable accuracy to the original attention-based models on ImageNet and multiple downstream tasks with reduced parameters and latency. Further analysis shows that FAR preserves the semantic token relationships learned by attention while improving computational efficiency, highlighting its potential for energy-efficient transformer inference on IMC-based edge accelerators.
Crisis support teams’ technological openness and learning attitudes toward the AI based virtual patient system crisis support VR
BackgroundAgainst the backdrop of escalating global humanitarian crises, innovative didactic simulations are becoming increasingly important. A promising alternative to traditional classroom-based didactics for learning psychological