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Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Sumeet S. Singh

Large language models based on transformers have achieved great empirical successes. However, as they are deployed more widely, there is a growing need to better understand their internal mechanisms in order to make them more reliable.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-08 Alberto Bietti , Vivien Cabannes , Diane Bouchacourt , Herve Jegou , Leon Bottou

Transformer-based language models display impressive reasoning-like behavior, yet remain brittle on tasks that require stable symbolic manipulation. This paper develops a unified perspective on these phenomena by interpreting self-attention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar

Despite the remarkable empirical performance of Transformers, their theoretical understanding remains elusive. Here, we consider a deep multi-head self-attention network, that is closely related to Transformers yet analytically tractable.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Lorenzo Tiberi , Francesca Mignacco , Kazuki Irie , Haim Sompolinsky

Despite their central role in the success of foundational models and large-scale language modeling, the theoretical foundations governing the operation of Transformers remain only partially understood. Contemporary research has largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Sagar Ghosh , Kushal Bose , Swagatam Das

Transformer self-attention can be interpreted as a gradient flow on the unit sphere, in which tokens evolve under softmax interaction potentials and tend to form clusters. While prior work has established clustering behavior for single-head…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ayan Pendharkar

Deep neural networks are composed of layers of parametrised linear operations intertwined with non linear activations. In basic models, such as the multi-layer perceptron, a linear layer operates on a simple input vector embedding of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Jean-Marc Andreoli

We propose a causal interpretation of self-attention in the Transformer neural network architecture. We interpret self-attention as a mechanism that estimates a structural equation model for a given input sequence of symbols (tokens). The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Raanan Y. Rohekar , Yaniv Gurwicz , Shami Nisimov

Encoder transformer models compress information from all tokens in a sequence into a single [CLS] token to represent global context. This approach risks diluting fine-grained or hierarchical features, leading to information loss in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Asif Shahriar , Rifat Shahriyar , M Saifur Rahman

While the successes of transformers across many domains are indisputable, accurate understanding of the learning mechanics is still largely lacking. Their capabilities have been probed on benchmarks which include a variety of structured and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Yuchen Li , Yuanzhi Li , Andrej Risteski

Transformer architectures have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) through their attention mechanisms, yet the computational principles underlying their success remain opaque. We present a novel theoretical framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Mu Qiao

Transformers, adapted from natural language processing, are emerging as a leading approach for graph representation learning. Contemporary graph transformers often treat nodes or edges as separate tokens. This approach leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Zihan Pengmei , Zimu Li , Chih-chan Tien , Risi Kondor , Aaron R. Dinner

Transformers have dominated sequence processing tasks for the past seven years -- most notably language modeling. However, the inherent quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism remains a significant bottleneck as context length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Alexander M. Fichtl , Jeremias Bohn , Josefin Kelber , Edoardo Mosca , Georg Groh

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

Attention mechanism has gained huge popularity due to its effectiveness in achieving high accuracy in different domains. But attention is opportunistic and is not justified by the content or usability of the content. Transformer like…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Chiranjib Sur

Transformer-based models have demonstrated considerable potential for source code modeling tasks in software engineering. However, they are limited by their dependence solely on automatic self-attention weight learning mechanisms. Previous…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Jiri Gesi , Iftekhar Ahmed

Attention mechanisms have recently boosted performance on a range of NLP tasks. Because attention layers explicitly weight input components' representations, it is also often assumed that attention can be used to identify information that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Sofia Serrano , Noah A. Smith

Transformers have recently shown superior performances on various vision tasks. The large, sometimes even global, receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power over their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Zhuofan Xia , Xuran Pan , Shiji Song , Li Erran Li , Gao Huang