Performer is a Transformer architecture which can estimate regular (softmax) full-rank-attention Transformers with provable accuracy, but using only linear (as opposed to quadratic) space and time complexity, without relying on any priors such as sparsity or low-rankness. Performers are linear architectures fully compatible with regular Transformers and with strong theoretical guarantees: unbiased or nearly-unbiased estimation of the attention matrix, uniform convergence and low estimation variance. To approximate softmax attention-kernels, Performers use a Fast Attention Via positive Orthogonal Random features approach (FAVOR+), leveraging new methods for approximating softmax and Gaussian kernels.
Reformer is a Transformer based architecture that seeks to make efficiency improvements. Dot-product attention is replaced by one that uses locality-sensitive hashing, changing its complexity from O($L^2$) to O($L\log L$), where $L$ is the length of the sequence. Furthermore, Reformers use reversible residual layers instead of the standard residuals, which allows storing activations only once in the training process instead of $N$ times, where $N$ is the number of layers.