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Multi-head self-attention-based Transformers have shown promise in different learning tasks. Albeit these models exhibit significant improvement in understanding short-term and long-term contexts from sequences, encoders of Transformers and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Ayan Sengupta , Md Shad Akhtar , Tanmoy Chakraborty

The self-attention mechanism has significantly advanced the field of natural language processing, facilitating the development of advanced language-learning machines. Although its utility is widely acknowledged, the precise mechanisms of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Tal Halevi , Yarden Tzach , Ronit D. Gross , Shalom Rosner , Ido Kanter

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

The Transformer architecture has two main non-embedding components: Attention and the Feed Forward Network (FFN). Attention captures interdependencies between words regardless of their position, while the FFN non-linearly transforms each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Telmo Pessoa Pires , António V. Lopes , Yannick Assogba , Hendra Setiawan

Self-attention is an attention mechanism that learns a representation by relating different positions in the sequence. The transformer, which is a sequence model solely based on self-attention, and its variants achieved state-of-the-art…

Sound · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Minz Won , Sanghyuk Chun , Xavier Serra

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Pretrained embeddings based on the Transformer architecture have taken the NLP community by storm. We show that they can mathematically be reframed as a sum of vector factors and showcase how to use this reframing to study the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Timothee Mickus , Denis Paperno , Mathieu Constant

This paper presents a mathematical interpretation of self-attention by connecting it to distributional semantics principles. We show that self-attention emerges from projecting corpus-level co-occurrence statistics into sequence context.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Nihal Mehta

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jie Ren , Qipeng Guo , Hang Yan , Dongrui Liu , Quanshi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Self-attention mechanisms have revolutionised deep learning architectures, yet their core mathematical structures remain incompletely understood. In this work, we develop a category-theoretic framework focusing on the linear components of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Charles O'Neill

Recent advances in Transformer architectures have empowered their empirical success in a variety of tasks across different domains. However, existing works mainly focus on predictive accuracy and computational cost, without considering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Xing Han , Tongzheng Ren , Tan Minh Nguyen , Khai Nguyen , Joydeep Ghosh , Nhat Ho

We present a geometric framework for understanding Transformer-based language models, drawing an explicit analogy to General Relativity. Queries and keys induce an effective metric on representation space, and attention acts as a discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Riccardo Di Sipio , Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez , Luis Serrano

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

Understanding the transformer architecture and its workings is essential for machine learning (ML) engineers. However, truly understanding the transformer architecture can be demanding, even if you have a solid background in machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Joni-Kristian Kämäräinen

Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Zhengxuan Wu , Thanh-Son Nguyen , Desmond C. Ong

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Gerard Sant , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Marta R. Costa-Jussà

Transformer with self-attention has led to the revolutionizing of natural language processing field, and recently inspires the emergence of Transformer-style architecture design with competitive results in numerous computer vision tasks.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Yehao Li , Ting Yao , Yingwei Pan , Tao Mei

Next to scaling considerations, architectural design choices profoundly shape the solution space of transformers. In this work, we analyze the solutions simple transformer blocks implement when tackling the histogram task: counting items in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Freya Behrens , Luca Biggio , Lenka Zdeborová