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Related papers: Quantifying Attention Flow in Transformers

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This paper identifies significant redundancy in the query-key interactions within self-attention mechanisms of diffusion transformer models, particularly during the early stages of denoising diffusion steps. In response to this observation,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Jiayi Guo , Dongchen Han , Qixiu Li , Duo Li , Yuhui Yuan , Ji Li , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang , Xiu Li

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

Transformers in their common form are inherently limited to operate on whole token sequences rather than on one token at a time. Consequently, their use during online inference on time-series data entails considerable redundancy due to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Lukas Hedegaard , Arian Bakhtiarnia , Alexandros Iosifidis

Current data-driven methodologies for point cloud matching demand extensive training time and computational resources, presenting significant challenges for model deployment and application. In the point cloud matching task, recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Alessandro Riva , Alessandro Raganato , Simone Melzi

This study aims to enhance the quality of music generation using Transformers by incorporating meta-information. While Transformer-based approaches are effective at capturing long-term dependencies in musical compositions, the music they…

Sound · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Shinnosuke Taksuka , Hideo Mukai

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

Attention mechanisms have recently demonstrated impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, and attention scores are often used as a proxy for model explainability. However, there is a debate on whether attention weights can, in fact,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Bingyang Wen , K. P. Subbalakshmi , Fan Yang

Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yuandong Tian , Yiping Wang , Beidi Chen , Simon Du

We revisit the design choices in Transformers, and propose methods to address their weaknesses in handling long sequences. First, we propose a simple layer named gated attention unit, which allows the use of a weaker single-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Weizhe Hua , Zihang Dai , Hanxiao Liu , Quoc V. Le

While attention has been empirically shown to improve model performance, it lacks a rigorous mathematical justification. This short paper establishes a novel connection between attention mechanisms and multinomial regression. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr

In multi-source sequence-to-sequence tasks, the attention mechanism can be modeled in several ways. This topic has been thoroughly studied on recurrent architectures. In this paper, we extend the previous work to the encoder-decoder…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-13 Jindřich Libovický , Jindřich Helcl , David Mareček

We present the Condensate Theorem: attention sparsity is a learned topological property, not an architectural constraint. Through empirical analysis of trained language models, we find that attention mass concentrates on a distinct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jorge L. Ruiz Williams

\textit{Attention} computes the dependency between representations, and it encourages the model to focus on the important selective features. Attention-based models, such as Transformer and graph attention network (GAT), are widely utilized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Kyungwoo Song , Yohan Jung , Dongjun Kim , Il-Chul Moon

Inspired by the human cognitive system, attention is a mechanism that imitates the human cognitive awareness about specific information, amplifying critical details to focus more on the essential aspects of data. Deep learning has employed…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mohammed Hassanin , Saeed Anwar , Ibrahim Radwan , Fahad S Khan , Ajmal Mian

The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Michael Hassid , Hao Peng , Daniel Rotem , Jungo Kasai , Ivan Montero , Noah A. Smith , Roy Schwartz

Position modeling plays a critical role in Transformers. In this paper, we focus on length extrapolation, i.e., training on short texts while evaluating longer sequences. We define attention resolution as an indicator of extrapolation. Then…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-21 Yutao Sun , Li Dong , Barun Patra , Shuming Ma , Shaohan Huang , Alon Benhaim , Vishrav Chaudhary , Xia Song , Furu Wei

In both Computer Vision and the wider Deep Learning field, the Transformer architecture is well-established as state-of-the-art for many applications. For Multitask Learning, however, where there may be many more queries necessary compared…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Christian Bohn , Thomas Kurbiel , Klaus Friedrichs , Hasan Tercan , Tobias Meisen

Attention-based models, such as Transformer, excel across various tasks but lack a comprehensive theoretical understanding, especially regarding token-wise sparsity and internal linear representations. To address this gap, we introduce the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-27 Pierre Marion , Raphaël Berthier , Gérard Biau , Claire Boyer

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

Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Zhengxuan Wu , Thanh-Son Nguyen , Desmond C. Ong