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Related papers: Attention is not Explanation

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Shapley Values, a solution to the credit assignment problem in cooperative game theory, are a popular type of explanation in machine learning, having been used to explain the importance of features, embeddings, and even neurons. In NLP,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Kawin Ethayarajh , Dan Jurafsky

Attention mechanism is contributing to the majority of recent advances in machine learning for natural language processing. Additionally, it results in an attention map that shows the proportional influence of each input in its decision.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Duc Hau Nguyen , Cyrielle Mallart , Guillaume Gravier , Pascale Sébillot

Attention maps in neural models for NLP are appealing to explain the decision made by a model, hopefully emphasizing words that justify the decision. While many empirical studies hint that attention maps can provide such justification from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Duc Hau Nguyen , Duc Hau Nguyen , Pascale Sébillot

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Hasi Hays

Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

By computing the rank correlation between attention weights and feature-additive explanation methods, previous analyses either invalidate or support the role of attention-based explanations as a faithful and plausible measure of salience.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Michael Neely , Stefan F. Schouten , Maurits J. R. Bleeker , Ana Lucic

Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of interpretation methods being developed for improving transparency of NLP models. Meanwhile, researchers also try to answer the question that whether the obtained interpretation is faithful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-17 Ninghao Liu , Yunsong Meng , Xia Hu , Tie Wang , Bo Long

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Dayiheng Liu , Rong Xiao , Derek F. Wong , Haibo Zhang , Boxing Chen , Lidia S. Chao

The debate around the interpretability of attention mechanisms is centered on whether attention scores can be used as a proxy for the relative amounts of signal carried by sub-components of data. We propose to study the interpretability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-27 Jonathan Haab , Nicolas Deutschmann , Maria Rodríguez Martínez

The attention mechanism is a core component of the Transformer architecture. Beyond improving performance, attention has been proposed as a mechanism for explainability via attention weights, which are associated with input features (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Andrés Carvallo , Denis Parra , Peter Brusilovsky , Hernan Valdivieso , Gabriel Rada , Ivania Donoso , Vladimir Araujo

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Ryan Singh , Christopher L. Buckley

Advances in language modeling have led to the development of deep attention-based models that are performant across a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) problems. These language models are typified by a pre-training process…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Joseph F DeRose , Jiayao Wang , Matthew Berger

Attention mechanism in sequence-to-sequence models is designed to model the alignments between acoustic features and output tokens in speech recognition. However, attention weights produced by models trained end to end do not always…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-04-27 Gene-Ping Yang , Hao Tang

Attention is a key component of Transformers, which have recently achieved considerable success in natural language processing. Hence, attention is being extensively studied to investigate various linguistic capabilities of Transformers,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many natural language processing tasks, yet their decision processes remain difficult to interpret. This lack of transparency creates challenges for trust, debugging, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Venkata Abhinandan Kancharla

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have shown remarkable performance but remain largely opaque in their decision making processes. The interpretability of these models, especially their internal attention mechanisms, is critical for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Anurag Mishra

Interpretability is an important aspect of the trustworthiness of a model's predictions. Transformer's predictions are widely explained by the attention weights, i.e., a probability distribution generated at its self-attention unit (head).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Rishabh Bhardwaj , Navonil Majumder , Soujanya Poria , Eduard Hovy

Learned self-attention functions in state-of-the-art NLP models often correlate with human attention. We investigate whether self-attention in large-scale pre-trained language models is as predictive of human eye fixation patterns during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Stephanie Brandl , Oliver Eberle , Jonas Pilot , Anders Søgaard

Attention Model has now become an important concept in neural networks that has been researched within diverse application domains. This survey provides a structured and comprehensive overview of the developments in modeling attention. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Sneha Chaudhari , Varun Mithal , Gungor Polatkan , Rohan Ramanath