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Multi-head self-attention (MHSA) is a key component of Transformers, a widely popular architecture in both language and vision. Multiple heads intuitively enable different parallel processes over the same input. Yet, they also obscure the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Pooyan Rahmanzadehgervi , Hung Huy Nguyen , Rosanne Liu , Long Mai , Anh Totti Nguyen

There has recently been significant interest in training reinforcement learning (RL) agents in vision-based environments. This poses many challenges, such as high dimensionality and the potential for observational overfitting through…

In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenglun Kong , Yize Li , Fanhu Zeng , Lei Xin , Shvat Messica , Xue Lin , Pu Zhao , Manolis Kellis , Hao Tang , Marinka Zitnik

In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tiberiu Musat

Most state-of-the-art Deep Learning (DL) approaches for speaker recognition work on a short utterance level. Given the speech signal, these algorithms extract a sequence of speaker embeddings from short segments and those are averaged to…

Sound · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Miquel India , Pooyan Safari , Javier Hernando

In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models (LLMs) significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness, such as utilizing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Yuhan Chen , Ang Lv , Ting-En Lin , Changyu Chen , Yuchuan Wu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li , Rui Yan

Large language models (LLMs) often concentrate their attention on a few specific tokens referred to as attention sinks. Common examples include the first token, a prompt-independent sink, and punctuation tokens, which are prompt-dependent.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Stephen Zhang , Mustafa Khan , Vardan Papyan

Large language models have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks, owing to their exceptional capabilities in context modeling. The most commonly used method of context modeling is full self-attention, as seen in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Zhisong Zhang , Yan Wang , Xinting Huang , Tianqing Fang , Hongming Zhang , Chenlong Deng , Shuaiyi Li , Dong Yu

We investigate how embedding dimension affects the emergence of an internal "world model" in a transformer trained with reinforcement learning to perform bubble-sort-style adjacent swaps. Models achieve high accuracy even with very small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Brady Bhalla , Honglu Fan , Nancy Chen , Tony Yue YU

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multi-head attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Zewei Sun , Shujian Huang , Xin-Yu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective models of the human language system, with some models predicting most explainable variance of brain activity in current datasets. Even in untrained models, the representations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Badr AlKhamissi , Greta Tuckute , Antoine Bosselut , Martin Schrimpf

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at recall, the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-10 Simran Arora , Sabri Eyuboglu , Michael Zhang , Aman Timalsina , Silas Alberti , Dylan Zinsley , James Zou , Atri Rudra , Christopher Ré

Low-resource languages (LRLs) face significant challenges in natural language processing (NLP) due to limited data. While current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) still struggle with LRLs, smaller multilingual models (mLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Daniil Gurgurov , Ivan Vykopal , Josef van Genabith , Simon Ostermann

Recent works show we can linearize large language models (LLMs) -- swapping the quadratic attentions of popular Transformer-based LLMs with subquadratic analogs, such as linear attention -- avoiding the expensive pretraining costs. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Michael Zhang , Simran Arora , Rahul Chalamala , Alan Wu , Benjamin Spector , Aaryan Singhal , Krithik Ramesh , Christopher Ré

The current large language models are mainly based on decode-only structure transformers, which have great in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. It is generally believed that the important foundation of its ICL capability is the induction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Mingyu Xu , Wei Cheng , Bingning Wang , Weipeng Chen

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Noam Shazeer

Long-context inference in large language models is bottlenecked by Key--Value (KV) cache loading during the decoding stage, where the sequential nature of generation requires repeatedly transferring the KV cache from off-chip High-Bandwidth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Songtao Liu , Hongwu Peng , Zhiwei Zhang , Zhengyu Chen , Yue Guo

The state of the art in learning meaningful semantic representations of words is the Transformer model and its attention mechanisms. Simply put, the attention mechanisms learn to attend to specific parts of the input dispensing recurrence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Dongsheng Wang , Casper Hansen , Lucas Chaves Lima , Christian Hansen , Maria Maistro , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Christina Lioma

Token representation strategies within large-scale neural architectures often rely on contextually refined embeddings, yet conventional approaches seldom encode structured relationships explicitly within token interactions. Self-attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-27 James Blades , Frederick Somerfield , William Langley , Susan Everingham , Maurice Witherington