arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language · · 3 min read

Q-Interference: Memory-Efficient Phase-Aware Quantum-Inspired Attention

Mirrored from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Computer Science > Computation and Language

arXiv:2608.17288 (cs)
[Submitted on 18 Aug 2026]

Title:Q-Interference: Memory-Efficient Phase-Aware Quantum-Inspired Attention

View a PDF of the paper titled Q-Interference: Memory-Efficient Phase-Aware Quantum-Inspired Attention, by Emama Nahid and 5 other authors
View PDF HTML (experimental)
Abstract:GPT attention measures token compatibility through dot-product similarity. This mechanism is simple, effective, and memory-efficient. But it does not explicitly model whether strong token features should reinforce or suppress one another. We introduce Q-Interference, a fully classical quantum-inspired attention mechanism for autoregressive language modeling that augments each query and key feature with an amplitude and a learned phase. The resulting attention score is phase-aware which aligned phases contribute constructively while conflicting phases contribute destructively. Although Q-Interference yields a richer interaction rule than similarity alone, a naive implementation of Q-Interference requires a large token-pair-feature interaction tensor, making it memory-intensive and often impractical. To address this limitation, we propose an exact trigonometric factorization that computes the same score using two standard matrix multiplications avoiding materialization of the large intermediate tensor. Q-Interference fits directly into a Transformer block in GPT and leaves the remainder of the model architecture and next-token prediction objective unchanged. Experiments on public benchmark datasets and baseline models show that the proposed reformulation trains stably in a controlled GPT-style setting and provides a consistent memory advantage over naive phase-aware interference attention. These results support the specific contribution of this work: an exact memory-efficient reformulation that makes phase-aware interference attention practical within a standard GPT pipeline.
Comments: Preprint
Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.17288 [cs.CL]
  (or arXiv:2608.17288v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
  https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.17288
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Emama Nahid [view email]
[v1] Tue, 18 Aug 2026 02:38:17 UTC (926 KB)
Full-text links:

Access Paper:

Current browse context:

cs.CL
< prev   |   next >
Change to browse by:
cs

References & Citations

Loading...

BibTeX formatted citation

loading...
Data provided by:

Bookmark

BibSonomy Reddit
Bibliographic Tools

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

Bibliographic Explorer Toggle
Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers Toggle
Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps Toggle
Litmaps (What is Litmaps?)
scite.ai Toggle
scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data, Media

Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article

alphaXiv Toggle
alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?)
Links to Code Toggle
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub Toggle
DagsHub (What is DagsHub?)
GotitPub Toggle
Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?)
Huggingface Toggle
Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?)
ScienceCast Toggle
ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?)
Demos

Demos

Replicate Toggle
Replicate (What is Replicate?)
Spaces Toggle
Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?)
Spaces Toggle
TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?)
Related Papers

Recommenders and Search Tools

Link to Influence Flower
Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?)
Core recommender toggle
CORE Recommender (What is CORE?)
About arXivLabs

arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators

arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from arXiv — NLP / Computation & Language