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Relational reasoning is a central component of generally intelligent systems, enabling robust and data-efficient inductive generalization. Recent empirical evidence shows that many existing neural architectures, including Transformers,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Awni Altabaa , John Lafferty

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

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

Owing to the use of attention mechanism to leverage the dependency across tokens, Transformers are efficient for natural language processing. By harnessing permutation properties broadly exist in resource allocation policies, each mapping…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-04 Jia Guo , Chenyang Yang

An extension of Transformers is proposed that enables explicit relational reasoning through a novel module called the Abstractor. At the core of the Abstractor is a variant of attention called relational cross-attention. The approach is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Awni Altabaa , Taylor Webb , Jonathan Cohen , John Lafferty

Continual learning involves learning from a stream of data without repetition of data points, a scenario that is inherently complex due to distributional shift across tasks. We propose a query-only attention mechanism that discards keys and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Gautham Bekal , Ashish Pujari , Scott David Kelly

Multi-head, key-value attention is the backbone of the widely successful Transformer model and its variants. This attention mechanism uses multiple parallel key-value attention blocks (called heads), each performing two fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-15 Sarthak Mittal , Sharath Chandra Raparthy , Irina Rish , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

\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

This paper introduces Generalized Attention Flow (GAF), a novel feature attribution method for Transformer-based models to address the limitations of current approaches. By extending Attention Flow and replacing attention weights with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Behrooz Azarkhalili , Maxwell Libbrecht

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

Explainable AI (XAI) has become critical as transformer-based models are deployed in high-stakes applications including healthcare, legal systems, and financial services, where opacity hinders trust and accountability. Transformers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-22 George Mihaila

Transformers have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their monolithic architecture presents challenges in interpretability, adaptability, and scalability. This paper introduces a novel modular Transformer architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Zhenyu Guo , Wenguang Chen

Transformer-based architectures are the most used architectures in many deep learning fields like Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision or Speech processing. It may encourage the direct use of Transformers in the constrained tasks,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-29 Youness Dkhissi , Valentin Vielzeuf , Elys Allesiardo , Anthony Larcher

Transformers have shown strong ability to model long-term dependencies and are increasingly adopted as world models in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) under partial observability. However, unlike natural language corpora, RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Daniel De Dios Allegue , Jinke He , Frans A. Oliehoek

The quadratic computational cost of the self-attention mechanism is a primary challenge in scaling Transformer models. While attention sparsity is widely studied as a technique to improve computational efficiency, it is almost universally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sagar Gandhi , Vishal Gandhi

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

Transformer-based models have been widely adopted for sentiment analysis tasks due to their exceptional ability to capture contextual information. However, these methods often exhibit suboptimal accuracy in certain scenarios. By analyzing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Yawei Liu

Variants dropout methods have been designed for the fully-connected layer, convolutional layer and recurrent layer in neural networks, and shown to be effective to avoid overfitting. As an appealing alternative to recurrent and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-29 Lin Zehui , Pengfei Liu , Luyao Huang , Junkun Chen , Xipeng Qiu , Xuanjing Huang