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Recently, sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising technique for interpreting activations in foundation models by disentangling features into a sparse set of concepts. However, identifying the optimal level of sparsity for…
Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…
Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…
The attention mechanism is the computational core of modern Transformer architectures, but its quadratic complexity in the input sequence length is the bottleneck for large-scale inference. This has motivated a rapidly growing body of work…
Converting an n-dimensional vector to a probability distribution over n objects is a commonly used component in many machine learning tasks like multiclass classification, multilabel classification, attention mechanisms etc. For this,…
We propose sparsemax, a new activation function similar to the traditional softmax, but able to output sparse probabilities. After deriving its properties, we show how its Jacobian can be efficiently computed, enabling its use in a network…
Attention mechanism plays a dominant role in the sequence generation models and has been used to improve the performance of machine translation and abstractive text summarization. Different from neural machine translation, in the task of…
The self-attention mechanism traditionally relies on the softmax operator, necessitating positional embeddings like RoPE, or position biases to account for token order. But current methods using still face length generalisation challenges.…
SoftMax is a ubiquitous ingredient of modern machine learning algorithms. It maps an input vector onto a probability simplex and reweights the input by concentrating the probability mass at large entries. Yet, as a smooth approximation to…
The growing demand for long-context inference capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) has intensified the computational and memory bottlenecks inherent to the self-attention mechanism. To address this challenge, we introduce BLASST, a…
Transformers' quadratic complexity with respect to the input sequence length has motivated a body of work on efficient sparse approximations to softmax. An alternative path, used by entmax transformers, consists of having built-in exact…
Accommodating long sequences efficiently in autoregressive Transformers, especially within an extended context window, poses significant challenges due to the quadratic computational complexity and substantial KV memory requirements…
The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…
An efficient attention implementation is essential for large models due to its quadratic time complexity. Fortunately, attention commonly exhibits sparsity, i.e., many values in the attention map are near zero, allowing for the omission of…
The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…
The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…
Attention mechanisms represent a fundamental paradigm shift in neural network architectures, enabling models to selectively focus on relevant portions of input sequences through learned weighting functions. This monograph provides a…
Balancing predictive power and interpretability has long been a challenging research area, particularly in powerful yet complex models like neural networks, where nonlinearity obstructs direct interpretation. This paper introduces a novel…
Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…
In recent years, the attention mechanism contributes significantly to hypergraph based neural networks. However, these methods update the attention weights with the network propagating. That is to say, this type of attention mechanism is…