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Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to Large Language Models. In generative Transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, GPU-stored…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Nathan Leroux , Paul-Philipp Manea , Chirag Sudarshan , Jan Finkbeiner , Sebastian Siegel , John Paul Strachan , Emre Neftci

This thesis examines self-attention training through the lens of Optimal Transport (OT) and develops an OT-based alternative for tabular classification. The study tracks intermediate projections of the self-attention layer during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Alessandro Quadrio , Antonio Candelieri

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

The computational demands of self-attention mechanisms pose a critical challenge for transformer-based video generation, particularly in synthesizing ultra-long sequences. Current approaches, such as factorized attention and fixed sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Qirui Li , Guangcong Zheng , Qi Zhao , Jie Li , Bin Dong , Yiwu Yao , Xi Li

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

Although Transformer models such as Google's BERT and OpenAI's GPT-3 are successful in many natural language processing tasks, training and deploying these models are costly and inefficient.Even if pre-trained models are used, deploying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Madhusudan Verma

Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Catherine Yeh , Yida Chen , Aoyu Wu , Cynthia Chen , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

We incorporate Tensor-Product Representations within the Transformer in order to better support the explicit representation of relation structure. Our Tensor-Product Transformer (TP-Transformer) sets a new state of the art on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Imanol Schlag , Paul Smolensky , Roland Fernandez , Nebojsa Jojic , Jürgen Schmidhuber , Jianfeng Gao

Self-attention is essential to Transformer architectures, yet how information is embedded in the self-attention matrices and how different objective functions impact this process remains unclear. We present a mathematical framework to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Matteo Saponati , Pascal Sager , Pau Vilimelis Aceituno , Thilo Stadelmann , Benjamin Grewe

It is widely accepted from transformer research that "attention is all we need", but the amount of attention required has never been systematically quantified. Is quadratic $O(L^2)$ attention necessary, or is there a sub-quadratic attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yufeng Huang

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

Self-attention layers have become fundamental building blocks of modern deep neural networks, yet their theoretical understanding remains limited, particularly from the perspective of random matrix theory. In this work, we provide a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-15 Tomohiro Hayase , Benoît Collins , Ryo Karakida

The success of Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) stems from their attention mechanism. While this mechanism has been extensively studied in explainability research, particularly through the attention values obtained during the forward…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

We introduce a new interpretation of the attention matrix as a discrete-time Markov chain. Our interpretation sheds light on common operations involving attention scores such as selection, summation, and averaging in a unified framework. It…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yotam Erel , Olaf Dünkel , Rishabh Dabral , Vladislav Golyanik , Christian Theobalt , Amit H. Bermano

Much of recent Deep Reinforcement Learning success is owed to the neural architecture's potential to learn and use effective internal representations of the world. While many current algorithms access a simulator to train with a large…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-03 Amir Ardalan Kalantari , Mohammad Amini , Sarath Chandar , Doina Precup

Attention mechanisms have raised significant interest in the research community, since they promise significant improvements in the performance of neural network architectures. However, in any specific problem, we still lack a principled…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Rafael Pedro , Arlindo L. Oliveira

Transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in a wide range of NLP tasks including summarization. Training and inference using large transformer models can be computationally expensive. Previous work has focused on one…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-10 Potsawee Manakul , Mark J. F. Gales

In this paper we delve deep in the Transformer architecture by investigating two of its core components: self-attention and contextual embeddings. In particular, we study the identifiability of attention weights and token embeddings, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Gino Brunner , Yang Liu , Damián Pascual , Oliver Richter , Massimiliano Ciaramita , Roger Wattenhofer

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Juho Lee , Yoonho Lee , Jungtaek Kim , Adam R. Kosiorek , Seungjin Choi , Yee Whye Teh