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The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

The attention interaction matrix $QK^{\top}$ contains two entangled computations: a skew-symmetric component that redistributes information between positions (routing) and a symmetric component that scales mutual relevance (filtering). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Shafayeth Jamil , Rehan Kapadia

Transformer-based architectures achieved high performance in natural language processing and computer vision, yet many studies have shown that they have not demonstrated a clear advantage in time series forecasting and even underperform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Zida Liang , Jiayi Zhu , Weiqiang Sun

As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Eli Sason , Darya Frolova , Boris Nazarov , Felix Goldberd

Transformers have emerged as a powerful neural network architecture capable of tackling a wide range of learning tasks. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of their ability to automatically extract structure from data in an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Pierre Marion , Claire Boyer

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee

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

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

We revisit a basic question in sequence modeling: is explicit self-attention actually necessary for strong performance and reasoning? We argue that standard multi-head attention is best seen as a form of tensor lifting: hidden vectors are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Zhang Chong

\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

Attention layers are the core component of transformers, the current state-of-the-art neural network architecture. Alternatives to softmax-based attention are being explored due to its tendency to hinder effective information flow. Even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Thiziri Nait Saada , Alireza Naderi , Jared Tanner

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

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

Neural networks using transformer-based architectures have recently demonstrated great power and flexibility in modeling sequences of many types. One of the core components of transformer networks is the attention layer, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Matthew Spellings

As an essential ingredient of modern deep learning, attention mechanism, especially self-attention, plays a vital role in the global correlation discovery. However, is hand-crafted attention irreplaceable when modeling the global context?…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Zhengyang Geng , Meng-Hao Guo , Hongxu Chen , Xia Li , Ke Wei , Zhouchen Lin

Since the popularization of the Transformer as a general-purpose feature encoder for NLP, many studies have attempted to decode linguistic structure from its novel multi-head attention mechanism. However, much of such work focused almost…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-27 Vinit Ravishankar , Artur Kulmizev , Mostafa Abdou , Anders Søgaard , Joakim Nivre

Transformers have sprung up in the field of computer vision. In this work, we explore whether the core self-attention module in Transformer is the key to achieving excellent performance in image recognition. To this end, we build an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Chuanxin Tang , Yucheng Zhao , Guangting Wang , Chong Luo , Wenxuan Xie , Wenjun Zeng

Attention is a key component of the now ubiquitous pre-trained language models. By learning to focus on relevant pieces of information, these Transformer-based architectures have proven capable of tackling several tasks at once and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Vincent Micheli , Quentin Heinrich , François Fleuret , Wacim Belblidia

Attention-based models are successful when trained on large amounts of data. In this paper, we demonstrate that even in the low-resource scenario, attention can be learned effectively. To this end, we start with discrete human-annotated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-29 Yujia Bao , Shiyu Chang , Mo Yu , Regina Barzilay

Attention mechanisms have improved the performance of NLP tasks while allowing models to remain explainable. Self-attention is currently widely used, however interpretability is difficult due to the numerous attention distributions. Recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Khalil Mrini , Franck Dernoncourt , Quan Tran , Trung Bui , Walter Chang , Ndapa Nakashole