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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

Attention-based methods have played important roles in model interpretations, where the calculated attention weights are expected to highlight the critical parts of inputs~(e.g., keywords in sentences). However, recent research found that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-04 Bing Bai , Jian Liang , Guanhua Zhang , Hao Li , Kun Bai , Fei Wang

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

In this paper we delve deep in the Transformer architecture by investigating two of its core components: self-attention and contextual embeddings. In particular, we study the identifiability of attention weights and token embeddings, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Gino Brunner , Yang Liu , Damián Pascual , Oliver Richter , Massimiliano Ciaramita , Roger Wattenhofer

Pretrained language models based on the transformer architecture have shown great success in NLP. Textual training data often comes from the web and is thus tagged with time-specific information, but most language models ignore this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Guy D. Rosin , Kira Radinsky

Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-08 Danish Pruthi , Mansi Gupta , Bhuwan Dhingra , Graham Neubig , Zachary C. Lipton

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

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

The dominant sequence transduction models are based on complex recurrent or convolutional neural networks in an encoder-decoder configuration. The best performing models also connect the encoder and decoder through an attention mechanism.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-03 Ashish Vaswani , Noam Shazeer , Niki Parmar , Jakob Uszkoreit , Llion Jones , Aidan N. Gomez , Lukasz Kaiser , Illia Polosukhin

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

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

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

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Despite its original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, prior researches suggest that Transformer captures poor word alignments through its attention mechanism. In this paper, we show that attention weights DO capture accurate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Yun Chen , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu

State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Karim Ahmed , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher

The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Jesse Vig , Yonatan Belinkov

Attention in neural machine translation provides the possibility to encode relevant parts of the source sentence at each translation step. As a result, attention is considered to be an alignment model as well. However, there is no work that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-11 Hamidreza Ghader , Christof Monz

The great success of Transformer-based models benefits from the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism, which learns token dependencies and encodes contextual information from the input. Prior work strives to attribute model decisions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Ke Xu

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are the state-of-the-art for natural language tasks. Recent work has attempted to decode, by reverse engineering the role of linear layers, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs arrive at their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Mansi Sakarvadia , Arham Khan , Aswathy Ajith , Daniel Grzenda , Nathaniel Hudson , André Bauer , Kyle Chard , Ian Foster