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We advance a novel explanation of similarity-based interference effects in subject-verb and reflexive pronoun agreement processing, grounded in surprisal values computed from a pretrained large-scale Transformer model, GPT-2. Specifically,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-28 Soo Hyun Ryu , Richard L. Lewis

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

Attention architectures are widely used; they recently gained renewed popularity with Transformers yielding a streak of state of the art results. Yet, the geometrical implications of softmax-attention remain largely unexplored. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Self-attention has greatly contributed to the success of the widely used Transformer architecture by enabling learning from data with long-range dependencies. In an effort to improve performance, a gated attention model that leverages a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Viet Nguyen , Tuan Minh Pham , Thinh Cao , Tan Dinh , Huy Nguyen , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

The advent of Transformers marked a significant breakthrough in sequence modelling, providing a highly performant architecture capable of leveraging GPU parallelism. However, Transformers are computationally expensive at inference time,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Leo Feng , Frederick Tung , Hossein Hajimirsadeghi , Mohamed Osama Ahmed , Yoshua Bengio , Greg Mori

The attention mechanism in its standard implementation contains extraneous rotational degrees of freedom that are carried through computation but do not affect model activations or outputs. We introduce a simple symmetry-breaking protocol…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Eva Silverstein , Daniel Kunin , Vasudev Shyam

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

The Transformer is an extremely powerful and prominent deep learning architecture. In this work, we challenge the commonly held belief in deep learning that going deeper is better, and show an alternative design approach that is building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins

Transformer has significantly propelled the development of artificial intelligence, and certainly the development of agents as well. We categorize attention structures of Transformer into two types based on the source of the input…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yongjin Cui , Xiaohui Fan , Huajun Chen

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

With the development of the self-attention mechanism, the Transformer model has demonstrated its outstanding performance in the computer vision domain. However, the massive computation brought from the full attention mechanism became a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-13 Hai Lan , Xihao Wang , Xian Wei

Pairwise dot product-based attention allows Transformers to exchange information between tokens in an input-dependent way, and is key to their success across diverse applications in language and vision. However, a typical Transformer model…

The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Dongchen Han , Tianyu Li , Ziyi Wang , Gao Huang

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Juho Lee , Yoonho Lee , Jungtaek Kim , Adam R. Kosiorek , Seungjin Choi , Yee Whye Teh

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

The powerful modeling capabilities of all-attention-based transformer architectures often cause overfitting and - for natural language processing tasks - lead to an implicitly learned internal language model in the autoregressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Timo Lohrenz , Björn Möller , Zhengyang Li , Tim Fingscheidt

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

This paper presents a mathematical interpretation of self-attention by connecting it to distributional semantics principles. We show that self-attention emerges from projecting corpus-level co-occurrence statistics into sequence context.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Nihal Mehta

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Jiaoda Li , Jennifer C. White , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-22 Gianluigi Lopardo , Frederic Precioso , Damien Garreau