Compact rephrasing of “In contrast to previous work, our method …”

Question

I am writing an abstract for a paper, where I say the following:

"In contrast to previous work, our method does not rely on ...."

Then, about three sentences later, I would like to use a similar construct

"In contrast to previous work, where problem X is usually approached this way ...."

These constructs are useful to quickly highlight the contributions of your work in the abstract, but I would prefer avoiding the repetition of the exact same words, since the two sentences are close enough to each other in the text.

Can anybody think of a compact way of rephrasing either of these two sentences (without changing the structure of the text much) ?

Answer 1

Without a bit more context, it's hard to say how good a fit it would be, but something like

Unlike prior efforts, our method does not rely on...

Answer 2

Other possibilities

Our method introduces the element of....

or even

We pioneer the use of...