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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

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

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

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

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

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Haixu Wu , Jialong Wu , Jiehui Xu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

With the advent of large models based on the Transformer architecture, researchers have observed an anomalous phenomenon in the Attention mechanism--there is a very high attention on the first element, which is prevalent across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Ruiqing Yan , Xingbo Du , Haoyu Deng , Linghan Zheng , Qiuzhuang Sun , Jifang Hu , Yuhang Shao , Penghao Jiang , Jinrong Jiang , Lian Zhao

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Armin Gerami , Monte Hoover , Pranav S. Dulepet , Ramani Duraiswami

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

Transformer architectures have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) through their attention mechanisms, yet the computational principles underlying their success remain opaque. We present a novel theoretical framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Mu Qiao

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

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning in numerous fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Their strength lies in their attention mechanism, which allows for the discovering of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Uladzislau Yorsh , Martin Holeňa , Ondřej Bojar , David Herel

Unneeded elements in the attention's context degrade performance. We introduce Selective Attention, a simple parameter-free change to the standard attention mechanism which reduces attention to unneeded elements. Selective attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan

We propose a graph-oriented attention-based explainability method for tabular data. Tasks involving tabular data have been solved mostly using traditional tree-based machine learning models which have the challenges of feature selection and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Andrea Treviño Gavito , Diego Klabjan , Jean Utke

The Transformer architecture has gained growing attention in graph representation learning recently, as it naturally overcomes several limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs) by avoiding their strict structural inductive biases and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-14 Dexiong Chen , Leslie O'Bray , Karsten Borgwardt

Relying entirely on an attention mechanism, the Transformer introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017) achieves state-of-the-art results for machine translation. In contrast to recurrent and convolutional neural networks, it does not explicitly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-04-16 Peter Shaw , Jakob Uszkoreit , Ashish Vaswani

Attention mechanisms play a central role in NLP systems, especially within recurrent neural network (RNN) models. Recently, there has been increasing interest in whether or not the intermediate representations offered by these modules may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Sarah Wiegreffe , Yuval Pinter