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Related papers: Is Sparse Attention more Interpretable?

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Explaining and interpreting the decisions of recommender systems are becoming extremely relevant both, for improving predictive performance, and providing valid explanations to users. While most of the recent interest has focused on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Rishabh Jain , Pranava Madhyastha

We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Florent Draye , Anson Lei , Hsiao-Ru Pan , Ingmar Posner , Bernhard Schölkopf

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 debate around the interpretability of attention mechanisms is centered on whether attention scores can be used as a proxy for the relative amounts of signal carried by sub-components of data. We propose to study the interpretability of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-27 Jonathan Haab , Nicolas Deutschmann , Maria Rodríguez Martínez

This paper proposes a general interpretable predictive system with shared information. The system is able to perform predictions in a multi-task setting where distinct tasks are not bound to have the same input/output structure. Embeddings…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Maciej Żelaszczyk , Jacek Mańdziuk

Recent studies on interpretability of attention distributions have led to notions of faithful and plausible explanations for a model's predictions. Attention distributions can be considered a faithful explanation if a higher attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Akash Kumar Mohankumar , Preksha Nema , Sharan Narasimhan , Mitesh M. Khapra , Balaji Vasan Srinivasan , Balaraman Ravindran

Distributional models are derived from co-occurrences in a corpus, where only a small proportion of all possible plausible co-occurrences will be observed. This results in a very sparse vector space, requiring a mechanism for inferring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-08-25 Thomas Kober , Julie Weeds , Jeremy Reffin , David Weir

The attention layer in a neural network model provides insights into the model's reasoning behind its prediction, which are usually criticized for being opaque. Recently, seemingly contradictory viewpoints have emerged about the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-26 Shikhar Vashishth , Shyam Upadhyay , Gaurav Singh Tomar , Manaal Faruqui

Attention-based methods have played important roles in model interpretations, where the calculated attention weights are expected to highlight the critical parts of inputs~(e.g., keywords in sentences). However, recent research found that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-04 Bing Bai , Jian Liang , Guanhua Zhang , Hao Li , Kun Bai , Fei Wang

Explainability is a topic of growing importance in NLP. In this work, we provide a unified perspective of explainability as a communication problem between an explainer and a layperson about a classifier's decision. We use this framework to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Marcos V. Treviso , André F. T. Martins

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

Sparse neural networks are often hypothesized to be more interpretable than dense models, motivated by findings that weight sparsity can produce compact circuits in language models. However, it remains unclear whether structural sparsity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Siyu Zhang

Previous research on word embeddings has shown that sparse representations, which can be either learned on top of existing dense embeddings or obtained through model constraints during training time, have the benefit of increased…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-26 Valentin Trifonov , Octavian-Eugen Ganea , Anna Potapenko , Thomas Hofmann

Attention mechanism is contributing to the majority of recent advances in machine learning for natural language processing. Additionally, it results in an attention map that shows the proportional influence of each input in its decision.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Duc Hau Nguyen , Cyrielle Mallart , Guillaume Gravier , Pascale Sébillot

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

Transformer-based models have become state-of-the-art tools in various machine learning tasks, including time series classification, yet their complexity makes understanding their internal decision-making challenging. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Matīss Kalnāre , Sofoklis Kitharidis , Thomas Bäck , Niki van Stein

There is a recent surge of interest in using attention as explanation of model predictions, with mixed evidence on whether attention can be used as such. While attention conveniently gives us one weight per input token and is easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Jasmijn Bastings , Katja Filippova

Interpretability benefits the theoretical understanding of representations. Existing word embeddings are generally dense representations. Hence, the meaning of latent dimensions is difficult to interpret. This makes word embeddings like a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Minxue Xia , Hao Zhu

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

Sparse Attention is a technique that approximates standard attention computation with sub-quadratic complexity. This is achieved by selectively ignoring smaller entries in the attention matrix during the softmax function computation.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Jing Xiong , Chiwun Yang
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