RoPE Attention Can Be Trained in Almost Linear Time

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission14609 Authors

Keywords: Attention, Large Language Models, Theory, RoPE

Abstract: The Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) mechanism has become a powerful enhancement to the Transformer architecture, which enables models to capture token relationships when encoding positional information. However, the RoPE mechanisms make the computations of attention mechanisms more complicated, which makes efficient algorithms challenging. Earlier research introduced almost linear time algorithms for the forward computation under specific parameter settings of bounded entries (i.e., in time $n^{1+o(1)}$ where $n$ is the number of input tokens), but has not addressed backward computation. In this work, we develop the first almost linear time algorithm for backward computations in the RoPE-based attention under bounded entries. Our approach builds on recent advancements in fast RoPE attention computations, utilizing a novel combination of the polynomial method and the Fast Fourier Transform. Furthermore, we show that with lower bounds derived from the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), the bounded entry condition is necessary for subquadratic performance.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 14609