Papers › Sparse and Continuous Attention Mechanisms
Sparse and Continuous Attention Mechanisms
André F. T. Martins, António Farinhas, Marcos Treviso, Vlad Niculae, Pedro M. Q. Aguiar, Mário A. T. Figueiredo
Exponential families are widely used in machine learning; they include many distributions in continuous and discrete domains (e.g., Gaussian, Dirichlet, Poisson, and categorical distributions via the softmax transformation). Distributions in each of these families have fixed support. In contrast, for finite domains, there has been recent work on sparse alternatives to softmax (e.g. sparsemax and alpha-entmax), which have varying support, being able to assign zero probability to irrelevant categories. This paper expands that work in two directions: first, we extend alpha-entmax to continuous domains, revealing a link with Tsallis statistics and deformed exponential families. Second, we introduce continuous-domain attention mechanisms, deriving efficient gradient backpropagation algorithms for alpha in {1,2}. Experiments on attention-based text classification, machine translation, and visual question answering illustrate the use of continuous attention in 1D and 2D, showing that it allows attending to time intervals and compact regions.
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Code
Syntology Ran 12 of 15 code samples harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper; 3 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 3 ran · our draft was wrong; 9 ran with no contract checked.
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Code Syntology ran Syntology
15 samples harvested; 12 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 3 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 2 of the 15 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from 2 repositories linked to this paper, official or community; each sample names its own and says which. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | VQA v2 test-dev | 2D continuous softmax | Accuracy | 65.96 | #41 of 56 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Visual Question Answering (VQA) | VQA v2 test-std | 2D continuous softmax | overall | 66.27 | #35 of 38 | Archive leaderboard | report |
Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.
Methods
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