Focus Your Attention (with Adaptive IIR Filters)

We present a new layer in which dynamic (i.e.,input-dependent) Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filters of order two are used to process the input sequence prior to applying conventional attention. The input is split into chunks, and the coefficients of these filters are determined based on previous chunks to maintain causality. Despite their relatively low order, the causal adaptive filters are shown to focus attention on the relevant sequence elements. The layer performs on-par with state of the art networks, with a fraction of the parameters and with time complexity that is sub-quadratic with input size. The obtained layer is favorable to layers such as Heyna, GPT2, and Mega, both with respect to the number of parameters and the obtained level of performance on multiple long-range sequence problems.