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This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Weicheng Ma , Kai Zhang , Renze Lou , Lili Wang , Soroush Vosoughi

Understanding Transformer-based models has attracted significant attention, as they lie at the heart of recent technological advances across machine learning. While most interpretability methods rely on running models over inputs, recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guy Dar , Mor Geva , Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

The design choices in Transformer feed-forward neural networks have resulted in significant computational and parameter overhead. In this work, we emphasize the importance of hidden dimensions in designing lightweight FFNs, a factor often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Tong Zheng , Bei Li , Huiwen Bao , Jiale Wang , Weiqiao Shan , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

We study the power of cross-attention in the Transformer architecture within the context of transfer learning for machine translation, and extend the findings of studies into cross-attention when training from scratch. We conduct a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Mozhdeh Gheini , Xiang Ren , Jonathan May

Embedding layers in transformer-based NLP models typically account for the largest share of model parameters, scaling with vocabulary size but not yielding performance gains proportional to scale. We propose an alternative approach in which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Henry Ndubuaku , Mouad Talhi

Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell , Mrinmaya Sachan

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Transformers are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolaos Mylonas , Ioannis Mollas , Grigorios Tsoumakas

Determining an appropriate number of attention heads on one hand and the number of transformer-encoders, on the other hand, is an important choice for Computer Vision (CV) tasks using the Transformer architecture. Computing experiments…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Tomas Hrycej , Bernhard Bermeitinger , Siegfried Handschuh

Embedders play a central role in machine learning, projecting any object into numerical representations that can, in turn, be leveraged to perform various downstream tasks. The evaluation of embedding models typically depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Maxime Darrin , Philippe Formont , Ismail Ben Ayed , Jackie CK Cheung , Pablo Piantanida

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in general language understanding, generation and other tasks. However, when fine-tuning for specific domain tasks, the general knowledge accumulated in the pre-training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Weijie Wan , Jiangjiang Zhao

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

While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

Standard attention scales quadratically with sequence length. Efficient attention methods reduce this O(n^2) cost, but when retrofitted into pretrained models, they often degrade perplexity, downstream accuracy, or both. We introduce Focus,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Hengshuai Yao , Xing Chen , Ahmed Murtadha , Jin Li , Yasin Abbasi Yadkori , Shuai Shao , Changling Liu , Guan Wang , Mingli Yuan , William Chen , Sen Song

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

Large language models based on the transformer architecture can solve highly complex tasks, yet their fundamental limitations on simple algorithmic problems remain poorly understood. In this work, we focus on basic counting tasks and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Gilad Yehudai , Haim Kaplan , Guy Dar , Royi Rassin , Asma Ghandeharioun , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson

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

Transformers allow attention between all pairs of tokens, but there is reason to believe that most of these connections - and their quadratic time and memory - may not be necessary. But which ones? We evaluate the impact of sparsification…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Siddhartha Brahma , Polina Zablotskaia , David Mimno

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Paul Michel , Omer Levy , Graham Neubig

Transformer-based language models utilize the attention mechanism for substantial performance improvements in almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar attention structures are also extensively studied in several other…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Nurullah Sevim , Ege Ozan Özyedek , Furkan Şahinuç , Aykut Koç