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Related papers: Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers

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Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse domains. The key component of Transformers is self-attention, which learns the relationship between any two tokens in the input sequence. Recent studies have revealed that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Hyowon Wi , Jeongwhan Choi , Noseong Park

Latest development of neural models has connected the encoder and decoder through a self-attention mechanism. In particular, Transformer, which is solely based on self-attention, has led to breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Xindian Ma , Peng Zhang , Shuai Zhang , Nan Duan , Yuexian Hou , Dawei Song , Ming Zhou

This paper addresses the problem of understanding joint attention in third-person social scene videos. Joint attention is the shared gaze behaviour of two or more individuals on an object or an area of interest and has a wide range of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Ömer Sümer , Peter Gerjets , Ulrich Trautwein , Enkelejda Kasneci

Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mechanisms are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Tan M. Nguyen , Tam Nguyen , Nhat Ho , Andrea L. Bertozzi , Richard G. Baraniuk , Stanley J. Osher

We revisit the use of spectral techniques to replaces the attention mechanism in Transformers through Fourier Transform based token mixing, and present a comprehensive and novel reformulation of this technique in next generation transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Andrew Kiruluta , Andreas Lemos , Eric Lundy

Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Penghao Yu , Haotian Jiang , Zeyu Bao , Ruoxi Yu , Qianxiao Li

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

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

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

Recently, a considerable number of studies in computer vision involves deep neural architectures called vision transformers. Visual processing in these models incorporates computational models that are claimed to implement attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Paria Mehrani , John K. Tsotsos

Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Valérie Castin , Pierre Ablin , José Antonio Carrillo , Gabriel Peyré

Recently, the Transformer model that is based solely on attention mechanisms, has advanced the state-of-the-art on various machine translation tasks. However, recent studies reveal that the lack of recurrence hinders its further improvement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Jie Hao , Xing Wang , Baosong Yang , Longyue Wang , Jinfeng Zhang , Zhaopeng Tu

The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to…

Transformers are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolaos Mylonas , Ioannis Mollas , Grigorios Tsoumakas

Diffusion Transformers dominate video generation, but the quadratic complexity of attention computation introduces substantial latency. Attention sparsity reduces computational costs by focusing on critical tokens while ignoring…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Xuewen Liu , Zhikai Li , Jing Zhang , Mengjuan Chen , Qingyi Gu

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Neşet Özkan Tan , Alex Yuxuan Peng , Joshua Bensemann , Qiming Bao , Tim Hartill , Mark Gahegan , Michael Witbrock

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

Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ido Andrew Atad , Itamar Zimerman , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Aurko Roy , Mohammad Saffar , Ashish Vaswani , David Grangier

First derived from human intuition, later adapted to machine translation for automatic token alignment, attention mechanism, a simple method that can be used for encoding sequence data based on the importance score each element is assigned,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-15 Dichao Hu