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This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Erwan Fagnou , Paul Caillon , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

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

Vision transformer (ViT) expands the success of transformer models from sequential data to images. The model decomposes an image into many smaller patches and arranges them into a sequence. Multi-head self-attentions are then applied to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Yiran Li , Junpeng Wang , Xin Dai , Liang Wang , Chin-Chia Michael Yeh , Yan Zheng , Wei Zhang , Kwan-Liu Ma

Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

Pretrained language models based on the transformer architecture have shown great success in NLP. Textual training data often comes from the web and is thus tagged with time-specific information, but most language models ignore this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Guy D. Rosin , Kira Radinsky

Attention mechanisms have recently boosted performance on a range of NLP tasks. Because attention layers explicitly weight input components' representations, it is also often assumed that attention can be used to identify information that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Sofia Serrano , Noah A. Smith

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Neşet Özkan Tan , Alex Yuxuan Peng , Joshua Bensemann , Qiming Bao , Tim Hartill , Mark Gahegan , Michael Witbrock

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

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

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

Self-attention in vision transformers is often thought to perform perceptual grouping where tokens attend to other tokens with similar embeddings, which could correspond to semantically similar features of an object. However, attending to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Xu Pan , Aaron Philip , Ziqian Xie , Odelia Schwartz

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

Learned self-attention functions in state-of-the-art NLP models often correlate with human attention. We investigate whether self-attention in large-scale pre-trained language models is as predictive of human eye fixation patterns during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Stephanie Brandl , Oliver Eberle , Jonas Pilot , Anders Søgaard

Understanding the expressive power of transformers has recently attracted attention, as it offers insights into their abilities and limitations. Many studies analyze unique hard attention transformers, where attention selects a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Selim Jerad , Anej Svete , Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yihe Dong , Lorenzo Noci , Mikhail Khodak , Mufan Li

Although researchers' attention is more focused on the performance of Transformer models, the interpretation of Transformer can never be ignored. Gradient is widely utilized in Transformer interpretation. From the perspective of attention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yongjin Cui , Xiaohui Fan , Huajun Chen