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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Spandan Pratyush

Transformer-based language models have set new benchmarks across a wide range of NLP tasks, yet reliably estimating the uncertainty of their predictions remains a significant challenge. Existing uncertainty estimation (UE) techniques often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Elizaveta Kostenok , Daniil Cherniavskii , Alexey Zaytsev

Recent studies have revealed various manifestations of position bias in transformer architectures, from the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon to attention sinks, yet a comprehensive theoretical understanding of how attention masks and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xinyi Wu , Yifei Wang , Stefanie Jegelka , Ali Jadbabaie

Transformers have achieved significant success across various domains, relying on self-attention to capture dependencies. However, the standard first-order attention mechanism is often limited by a low-rank bottleneck, struggling to capture…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hanting Chen , Chong Zhu , Kai Han , Yuchuan Tian , Yuchen Liang , Tianyu Guo , Xinghao Chen , Dacheng Tao , Yunhe Wang

We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Mingze Wang , Weinan E

Transformers are extremely successful machine learning models whose mathematical properties remain poorly understood. Here, we rigorously characterize the behavior of transformers with hardmax self-attention and normalization sublayers as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Albert Alcalde , Giovanni Fantuzzi , Enrique Zuazua

Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell , Mrinmaya Sachan

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

Current data-driven methodologies for point cloud matching demand extensive training time and computational resources, presenting significant challenges for model deployment and application. In the point cloud matching task, recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Alessandro Riva , Alessandro Raganato , Simone Melzi

Transformers are powerful neural architectures that allow integrating different modalities using attention mechanisms. In this paper, we leverage the neural transformer architectures for multi-channel speech recognition systems, where the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-09 Feng-Ju Chang , Martin Radfar , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Brian King , Siegfried Kunzmann

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

In this paper, we share our reflections and insights on understanding Transformer architectures through the lens of associative memory--a classic psychological concept inspired by human cognition. We start with the basics of associative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shu Zhong , Mingyu Xu , Tenglong Ao , Guang Shi

Relying entirely on an attention mechanism, the Transformer introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017) achieves state-of-the-art results for machine translation. In contrast to recurrent and convolutional neural networks, it does not explicitly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-04-16 Peter Shaw , Jakob Uszkoreit , Ashish Vaswani

\textit{Attention} computes the dependency between representations, and it encourages the model to focus on the important selective features. Attention-based models, such as Transformer and graph attention network (GAT), are widely utilized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Kyungwoo Song , Yohan Jung , Dongjun Kim , Il-Chul Moon

Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Dustin Wang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Steven Abreu , Yong Shan , Taylor Kergan , Yuqi Pan , Yuhong Chou , Zheng Li , Ge Zhang , Wenhao Huang , Jason Eshraghian

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

The Transformer architecture has become a cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence, but its core self-attention mechanism suffers from a complexity bottleneck that scales quadratically with sequence length, severely limiting its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zhongpan Tang

Transformer-based language models have achieved impressive success in various natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture complex dependencies and contextual information using self-attention mechanisms. However, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Kaushik Roy , Yuxin Zi , Vignesh Narayanan , Manas Gaur , Amit Sheth

Transformer architectures have proven to learn useful representations for protein classification and generation tasks. However, these representations present challenges in interpretability. In this work, we demonstrate a set of methods for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jesse Vig , Ali Madani , Lav R. Varshney , Caiming Xiong , Richard Socher , Nazneen Fatema Rajani