English
Related papers

Related papers: Attention is not Explanation

200 papers

While the general task of textual sentiment classification has been widely studied, much less research looks specifically at sentiment between a specified source and target. To tackle this problem, we experimented with a state-of-the-art…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-20 Ruiqi Zhong , Steven Shao , Kathleen McKeown

In this paper, we address the "black-box" problem in predictive process analytics by building interpretable models that are capable to inform both what and why is a prediction. Predictive process analytics is a newly emerged discipline…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Bemali Wickramanayake , Zhipeng He , Chun Ouyang , Catarina Moreira , Yue Xu , Renuka Sindhgatta

Attention has become the core building block of modern machine learning (ML) by efficiently capturing the long-range dependencies among input tokens. Its inherently parallelizable structure allows for efficient performance scaling with the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-27 Zhenyu Liao , Jiaqing Liu , TianQi Hou , Difan Zou , Zenan Ling

Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-22 Gianluigi Lopardo , Frederic Precioso , Damien Garreau

This paper analyzes the predictions of image captioning models with attention mechanisms beyond visualizing the attention itself. We develop variants of layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) and gradient-based explanation methods, tailored…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Jiamei Sun , Sebastian Lapuschkin , Wojciech Samek , Alexander Binder

The success of self-attention lies in its ability to capture long-range dependencies and enhance context understanding, but it is limited by its computational complexity and challenges in handling sequential data with inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Md Kowsher , Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Chun-Nam Yu , Ozlem Ozmen Garibay , Niloofar Yousefi

Attention mechanism has been extensively integrated within mainstream neural network architectures, such as Transformers and graph attention networks. Yet, its underlying working principles remain somewhat elusive. What is its essence? Are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Tianyu Ruan , Shihua Zhang

The attention mechanism has been widely used in deep neural networks as a model component. By now, it has become a critical building block in many state-of-the-art natural language models. Despite its great success established empirically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Haoye Lu , Yongyi Mao , Amiya Nayak

Attention patterns play a crucial role in both training and inference of large language models (LLMs). Prior works have identified individual patterns such as retrieval heads, sink heads, and diagonal traces, yet these observations remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Qingyue Yang , Jie Wang , Xing Li , Yinqi Bai , Xialiang Tong , Huiling Zhen , Jianye Hao , Mingxuan Yuan , Bin Li

Deep learning models have achieved remarkable success in natural language inference (NLI) tasks. While these models are widely explored, they are hard to interpret and it is often unclear how and why they actually work. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-21 Reza Ghaeini , Xiaoli Z. Fern , Prasad Tadepalli

Multi-layer models with multiple attention heads per layer provide superior translation quality compared to simpler and shallower models, but determining what source context is most relevant to each target word is more challenging as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-02-01 Thomas Zenkel , Joern Wuebker , John DeNero

Understanding the reasons behind the exceptional success of transformers requires a better analysis of why attention layers are suitable for NLP tasks. In particular, such tasks require predictive models to capture contextual meaning which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-05-20 Simone Bombari , Marco Mondelli

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across multiple NLP tasks. However, the self-attention mechanism complexity scales quadratically with the sequence length, creating an obstacle for tasks involving long sequences, like in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-20 Belen Alastruey , Javier Ferrando , Gerard I. Gállego , Marta R. Costa-jussà

We analyze how large language models (LLMs) represent out-of-context words, investigating their reliance on the given context to capture their semantics. Our likelihood-guided text perturbations reveal a correlation between token likelihood…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Valeria Ruscio , Valentino Maiorca , Fabrizio Silvestri

Large Language Models are prone to biased predictions and hallucinations, underlining the paramount importance of understanding their model-internal reasoning process. However, achieving faithful attributions for the entirety of a black-box…

The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Jesse Vig , Yonatan Belinkov

Neural networks with attention have proven effective for many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we develop attention mechanisms for uncertainty detection. In particular, we generalize standardly used attention mechanisms by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-01-11 Heike Adel , Hinrich Schütze

To explain NLP models a popular approach is to use importance measures, such as attention, which inform input tokens are important for making a prediction. However, an open question is how well these explanations accurately reflect a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Andreas Madsen , Nicholas Meade , Vaibhav Adlakha , Siva Reddy

Natural language processing has greatly benefited from the introduction of the attention mechanism. However, standard attention models are of limited interpretability for tasks that involve a series of inference steps. We describe an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Martin Tutek , Jan Šnajder

While most approaches to automatically recognizing entailment relations have used classifiers employing hand engineered features derived from complex natural language processing pipelines, in practice their performance has been only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-03-02 Tim Rocktäschel , Edward Grefenstette , Karl Moritz Hermann , Tomáš Kočiský , Phil Blunsom