The FFT Strikes Back: An Efficient Alternative to Self-Attention

Conventional self-attention mechanisms incur quadratic complexity, limiting their scalability on long sequences. We introduce FFTNet, an adaptive spectral filtering framework that leverages the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to achieve global token mixing in $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$ time. By transforming inputs into the frequency domain, FFTNet exploits the orthogonality and energy preservation guaranteed by Parseval's theorem to capture long-range dependencies efficiently. A learnable spectral filter and modReLU activation dynamically emphasize salient frequency components, providing a rigorous and adaptive alternative to traditional self-attention. Experiments on the Long Range Arena and ImageNet benchmarks validate our theoretical insights and demonstrate superior performance over fixed Fourier and standard attention models.

@article{fein-ashley2025_2502.18394,
  title={ The FFT Strikes Again: An Efficient Alternative to Self-Attention },
  author={ Jacob Fein-Ashley and Rajgopal Kannan and Viktor Prasanna },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18394},
  year={ 2025 }
}