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Transformer-based models are popularly used in natural language processing (NLP). Its core component, self-attention, has aroused widespread interest. To understand the self-attention mechanism, a direct method is to visualize the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Han Shi , Jiahui Gao , Xiaozhe Ren , Hang Xu , Xiaodan Liang , Zhenguo Li , James T. Kwok

Several mechanisms to focus attention of a neural network on selected parts of its input or memory have been used successfully in deep learning models in recent years. Attention has improved image classification, image captioning, speech…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-08 Łukasz Kaiser , Samy Bengio

Sparse attention has been claimed to increase model interpretability under the assumption that it highlights influential inputs. Yet the attention distribution is typically over representations internal to the model rather than the inputs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Clara Meister , Stefan Lazov , Isabelle Augenstein , Ryan Cotterell

Self-attention mechanism is the key of the Transformer but often criticized for its computation demands. Previous token pruning works motivate their methods from the view of computation redundancy but still need to load the full network and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Sihao Lin , Pumeng Lyu , Dongrui Liu , Tao Tang , Xiaodan Liang , Andy Song , Xiaojun Chang

Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaojie Xia , Huigang Zhang , Chaoliang Zhong , Jun Sun , Yusuke Oishi

The neural attention mechanism has been incorporated into deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various domains. Most such models use multi-head self-attention which is appealing for the ability to attend to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Shujian Zhang , Xinjie Fan , Huangjie Zheng , Korawat Tanwisuth , Mingyuan Zhou

Transformers have become the dominant architecture across a wide range of domains, largely due to the effectiveness of multi-head attention in capturing diverse representation subspaces. However, standard multi-head attention activates all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Bilal Faye , Abdoulaye Mbaye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Transformer is a deep neural network that employs a self-attention mechanism to comprehend the contextual relationships within sequential data. Unlike conventional neural networks or updated versions of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Saidul Islam , Hanae Elmekki , Ahmed Elsebai , Jamal Bentahar , Najat Drawel , Gaith Rjoub , Witold Pedrycz

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to process graph-structured data is an active research area, yet current state-of-the-art approaches typically rely on multi-step pipelines with Graph Neural Network (GNN) encoders that compress rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Dario Vajda

Transformer-based models, such as BERT and GPT, have been widely adopted in natural language processing (NLP) due to their exceptional performance. However, recent studies show their vulnerability to textual adversarial attacks where the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Lujia Shen , Yuwen Pu , Shouling Ji , Changjiang Li , Xuhong Zhang , Chunpeng Ge , Ting Wang

Attention mechanisms play a central role in NLP systems, especially within recurrent neural network (RNN) models. Recently, there has been increasing interest in whether or not the intermediate representations offered by these modules may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Sarah Wiegreffe , Yuval Pinter

The success of Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) stems from their attention mechanism. While this mechanism has been extensively studied in explainability research, particularly through the attention values obtained during the forward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Transformers are the dominant architecture in NLP, but their training and fine-tuning is still very challenging. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a visual analytic framework for assisting researchers in such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-01 Raymond Li , Wen Xiao , Lanjun Wang , Hyeju Jang , Giuseppe Carenini

Transformers are state-of-the-art in a wide range of NLP tasks and have also been applied to many real-world products. Understanding the reliability and certainty of transformer model predictions is crucial for building trustable machine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Jiahuan Pei , Cheng Wang , György Szarvas

Mechanistic interpretability improves the safety, reliability, and robustness of large AI models. This study examined individual attention heads in vision transformers (ViTs) fine tuned on distorted 2D spectrogram images containing non…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Nooshin Bahador

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

Multi-headed attention heads are a mainstay in transformer-based models. Different methods have been proposed to classify the role of each attention head based on the relations between tokens which have high pair-wise attention. These roles…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Madhura Pande , Aakriti Budhraja , Preksha Nema , Pratyush Kumar , Mitesh M. Khapra

The use of transformer-based models is growing rapidly throughout society. With this growth, it is important to understand how they work, and in particular, how the attention mechanisms represent concepts. Though there are many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-02 Nicholas Pochinkov , Ben Pasero , Skylar Shibayama

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang