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Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai

Transformer-based architectures achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech processing. However, their immense capacity often leads to overfitting, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig , Syeda Anshrah Gillani , Abdul Akbar Khan , Shahid Munir Shah , Muhammad Omer Khan

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. The self-attention architecture allows transformer to combine information from all elements of a sequence into context-aware…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Mikhail S. Burtsev , Yuri Kuratov , Anton Peganov , Grigory V. Sapunov

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Standard transformers entangle all computation in a single residual stream, obscuring which components perform which functions. We introduce the Dual-Stream Transformer, which decomposes the residual stream into two functionally distinct…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 J. Clayton Kerce , Alexis Fox

Transformers have become the dominant architecture across a wide range of domains, largely due to the effectiveness of multi-head attention in capturing diverse representation subspaces. However, standard multi-head attention activates all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Bilal Faye , Abdoulaye Mbaye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

Multi-head attention empowers the recent success of transformers, the state-of-the-art models that have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond. These attention mechanisms compute the pairwise dot products between the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Tan Nguyen , Minh Pham , Tam Nguyen , Khai Nguyen , Stanley J. Osher , Nhat Ho

With parallelizable attention networks, the neural Transformer is very fast to train. However, due to the auto-regressive architecture and self-attention in the decoder, the decoding procedure becomes slow. To alleviate this issue, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-08 Biao Zhang , Deyi Xiong , Jinsong Su

Transformers flexibly operate over sets of real-valued vectors representing task-specific entities and their attributes, where each vector might encode one word-piece token and its position in a sequence, or some piece of information that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Cameron Diao , Ricky Loynd

Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaojie Xia , Huigang Zhang , Chaoliang Zhong , Jun Sun , Yusuke Oishi

The self-attention mechanism, at the heart of the Transformer model, is able to effectively model pairwise interactions between tokens. However, numerous recent works have shown that it is unable to perform basic tasks involving detecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sayak Chakrabarti , Toniann Pitassi , Josh Alman

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Qinglin Zhang , Siqi Zheng , Shiliang Zhang , Chong Deng , Hai Yu , Jiaqing Liu , Yukun Ma , Chong Zhang

Attention mechanisms have played a crucial role in the development of complex architectures such as Transformers in natural language processing. However, Transformers remain hard to interpret and are considered as black-boxes. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Milan Bhan , Nina Achache , Victor Legrand , Annabelle Blangero , Nicolas Chesneau

Attention mechanism is a significant part of Transformer models. It helps extract features from embedded vectors by adding global information and its expressivity has been proved to be powerful. Nevertheless, the quadratic complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Hanwen Liu , Yixuan Ma , Shi Jin , Yuguang Wang

The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Chendong Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Wen qi Wei , Xiaoyang Qu , Haoqian Wang , Jing Xiao

The neural attention mechanism plays an important role in many natural language processing applications. In particular, the use of multi-head attention extends single-head attention by allowing a model to jointly attend information from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-03 Bang An , Jie Lyu , Zhenyi Wang , Chunyuan Li , Changwei Hu , Fei Tan , Ruiyi Zhang , Yifan Hu , Changyou Chen

Self-attention in Transformers relies on globally normalized softmax weights, causing all tokens to compete for influence at every layer. When composed across depth, this interaction pattern induces strong synchronization dynamics that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingkun Liu , Yisong Yue , Max Welling , Yue Song

Deployments of artificial intelligence in medical diagnostics mandate not just accuracy and efficacy but also trust, emphasizing the need for explainability in machine decisions. The recent trend in automated medical image diagnostics leans…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Ugur Demir , Debesh Jha , Zheyuan Zhang , Elif Keles , Bradley Allen , Aggelos K. Katsaggelos , Ulas Bagci

While attention is all you need may be proving true, we do not know why: attention-based transformer models such as BERT are superior but how information flows from input tokens to output predictions are unclear. We introduce influence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-02 Kaiji Lu , Zifan Wang , Piotr Mardziel , Anupam Datta

Transformer is a powerful model for text understanding. However, it is inefficient due to its quadratic complexity to input sequence length. Although there are many methods on Transformer acceleration, they are still either inefficient on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie