English
Related papers

Related papers: Are Transformers universal approximators of sequen…

200 papers

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

Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

Since self-attention layers in Transformers are permutation invariant by design, positional encodings must be explicitly incorporated to enable spatial understanding. However, fixed-size lookup tables used in traditional learnable position…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Huayang Li , Yahui Liu , Hongyu Sun , Deng Cai , Leyang Cui , Wei Bi , Peilin Zhao , Taro Watanabe

Graph Transformers (GTs) such as SAN and GPS are graph processing models that combine Message-Passing GNNs (MPGNNs) with global Self-Attention. They were shown to be universal function approximators, with two reservations: 1. The initial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Eran Rosenbluth , Jan Tönshoff , Martin Ritzert , Berke Kisin , Martin Grohe

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable empirical success in modeling contextual relations, yet a clear understanding of their expressive power is still lacking. In this work, we introduce a measure-theoretic framework in which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Demián Fraiman

Transformers are a widespread and successful model architecture, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). The essential innovation of this architecture is the Attention Mechanism, which solves the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Bernhard Bermeitinger , Tomas Hrycej , Massimo Pavone , Julianus Kath , Siegfried Handschuh

The effectiveness of neural processes (NPs) in modelling posterior prediction maps -- the mapping from data to posterior predictive distributions -- has significantly improved since their inception. This improvement can be attributed to two…

We show that a constant number of self-attention layers can efficiently simulate, and be simulated by, a constant number of communication rounds of Massively Parallel Computation. As a consequence, we show that logarithmic depth is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

The study on the expressive power of transformers shows that transformers are permutation equivariant, and they can approximate all permutation-equivariant continuous functions on a compact domain. However, these results are derived under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Sejun Park , Yeachan Park , Geonho Hwang

We study the approximation of shift-invariant or equivariant functions by deep fully convolutional networks from the dynamical systems perspective. We prove that deep residual fully convolutional networks and their continuous-layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Ting Lin , Zuowei Shen , Qianxiao Li

Transformers have emerged as a powerful tool for a broad range of natural language processing tasks. A key component that drives the impressive performance of Transformers is the self-attention mechanism that encodes the influence or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-02 Yunyang Xiong , Zhanpeng Zeng , Rudrasis Chakraborty , Mingxing Tan , Glenn Fung , Yin Li , Vikas Singh

Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Ruize He , Dongchen Han , 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

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh

World modelling, i.e. building a representation of the rules that govern the world so as to predict its evolution, is an essential ability for any agent interacting with the physical world. Recent applications of the Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Francesco Petri , Luigi Asprino , Aldo Gangemi

We present a framework for using transformer networks as universal computers by programming them with specific weights and placing them in a loop. Our input sequence acts as a punchcard, consisting of instructions and memory for data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Angeliki Giannou , Shashank Rajput , Jy-yong Sohn , Kangwook Lee , Jason D. Lee , Dimitris Papailiopoulos

State of the art sequence-to-sequence models for large scale tasks perform a fixed number of computations for each input sequence regardless of whether it is easy or hard to process. In this paper, we train Transformer models which can make…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Maha Elbayad , Jiatao Gu , Edouard Grave , Michael Auli

We explore the approximation capabilities of Transformer networks for H\"older and Sobolev functions, and apply these results to address nonparametric regression estimation with dependent observations. First, we establish novel upper bounds…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-17 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Defeng Sun , Yang Wang , Bokai Yan

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. The self-attention architecture allows transformer to combine information from all elements of a sequence into context-aware…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Mikhail S. Burtsev , Yuri Kuratov , Anton Peganov , Grigory V. Sapunov

Transformer is the backbone of modern NLP models. In this paper, we propose RealFormer, a simple and generic technique to create Residual Attention Layer Transformer networks that significantly outperform the canonical Transformer and its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Ruining He , Anirudh Ravula , Bhargav Kanagal , Joshua Ainslie