Longformer / BigBird

Long-sequence Transformers such as Longformer (Beltagy, Peters & Cohan, 2020) and BigBird (Zaheer et al., 2020) replace the standard Transformer's O(n²) attention with sparse attention patterns that scale linearly, O(n), with sequence length. This lets a single model attend over thousands of tokens — full documents, legal texts, or genomic sequences — that would not fit a conventional Transformer.