{"url":"/method/lambda-layer","slug":"lambda-layer","name":"Lambda Layer","full_name":"Lambda Layer","full_name_withheld":false,"description_markdown":"**Lambda layers** are a building block for modeling long-range dependencies in data. They consist of long-range interactions between a query and a structured set of context elements at a reduced memory cost. Lambda layers transform each available context into a linear function, termed a lambda, which is then directly applied to the corresponding query. Whereas self-attention defines a similarity kernel between the query and the context elements, a lambda layer instead summarizes contextual information into a fixed-size linear function (i.e. a matrix), thus bypassing the need for memory-intensive attention maps.","description_state":"present","introduced_year":null,"introduced_by":{"title":"LambdaNetworks: Modeling Long-Range Interactions Without Attention","paper":"/paper/lambdanetworks-modeling-long-range-1","first_author":"Irwan Bello","n_authors":1,"url_abs":null,"archive_paper_url":"https://paperswithcode.com/paper/lambdanetworks-modeling-long-range-1"},"source":{"url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.08602v1","title":"LambdaNetworks: Modeling Long-Range Interactions Without Attention","url_on_a_paper_host":true},"code_snippet_url":"https://github.com/lucidrains/lambda-networks/blob/8116ff3685c679efaaca4137fc0f5d7cc88b5e4b/lambda_networks/lambda_networks.py#L22","code_snippet_url_on_a_code_host":true,"categories":[{"area":"General","area_id":"general","collection":"Long-Range Interaction Layers","url":"/methods/category/long-range-interaction-layers","pwc_aliases":[]}],"n_papers_tagged":2,"archive_num_papers":2,"papers_newest_first":[{"paper":"/paper/approximating-permutations-with-neural","title":"Approximating Permutations with Neural Network Components for Travelling Photographer Problem","date":"2022-04-30","arxiv_id":"2205.00242","n_code_links":0,"syntology":null},{"paper":"/paper/lambdanetworks-modeling-long-range-1","title":"LambdaNetworks: Modeling Long-Range Interactions Without Attention","date":"2021-02-17","arxiv_id":"2102.08602","n_code_links":7,"syntology":{"ran":2,"of":2,"unverified":0,"pointer_only":2}}],"papers_shown":2,"tasks":[{"task":"/task/bayesian-inference","name":"Bayesian Inference","papers":1},{"task":"/task/heuristic-search","name":"Heuristic Search","papers":1},{"task":"/task/image-classification","name":"Image Classification","papers":1},{"task":"/task/instance-segmentation","name":"Instance Segmentation","papers":1},{"task":"/task/object-detection","name":"Object Detection","papers":1},{"task":"/task/semantic-segmentation","name":"Semantic Segmentation","papers":1},{"task":"/task/image-classification","name":"image-classification","papers":1},{"task":"/task/object-detection-1","name":"object-detection","papers":1}],"tasks_shown":8,"n_tasks":8,"usage_by_year":[{"year":"2021","papers":1},{"year":"2022","papers":1}],"row_source":"methods_table","archive":{"source":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","archive_url":"https://paperswithcode.com/method/lambda-layer"},"syntology_read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00"}