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In both Computer Vision and the wider Deep Learning field, the Transformer architecture is well-established as state-of-the-art for many applications. For Multitask Learning, however, where there may be many more queries necessary compared…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Christian Bohn , Thomas Kurbiel , Klaus Friedrichs , Hasan Tercan , Tobias Meisen

Multi-head self-attention is a key component of the Transformer, a state-of-the-art architecture for neural machine translation. In this work we evaluate the contribution made by individual attention heads in the encoder to the overall…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Elena Voita , David Talbot , Fedor Moiseev , Rico Sennrich , Ivan Titov

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have demonstrated their effectiveness for a broad range of information retrieval and natural language processing tasks. As the core part of PLM, multi-head self-attention is appealing for its ability to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-07 Shanshan Wang , Zhumin Chen , Zhaochun Ren , Huasheng Liang , Qiang Yan , Pengjie Ren

Scaling pre-trained language models has resulted in large performance gains in various natural language processing tasks but comes with a large cost in memory requirements. Inspired by the position embeddings in transformers, we aim to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Huiyin Xue , Nikolaos Aletras

In mechanistic interpretability, recent work scrutinizes transformer "circuits" - sparse, mono or multi layer sub computations, that may reflect human understandable functions. Yet, these network circuits are rarely acid-tested for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Karan Bali , Jack Stanley , Praneet Suresh , Danilo Bzdok

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

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

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

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Hongyu Hè , Marko Kabic

Transformers have become the dominant architecture across a wide range of domains, largely due to the effectiveness of multi-head attention in capturing diverse representation subspaces. However, standard multi-head attention activates all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Bilal Faye , Abdoulaye Mbaye , Hanane Azzag , Mustapha Lebbah

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

Attention layers -- which map a sequence of inputs to a sequence of outputs -- are core building blocks of the Transformer architecture which has achieved significant breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Hengyu Fu , Tianyu Guo , Yu Bai , Song Mei

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multi-head attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-01 Zewei Sun , Shujian Huang , Xin-Yu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Recent trends of incorporating attention mechanisms in vision have led researchers to reconsider the supremacy of convolutional layers as a primary building block. Beyond helping CNNs to handle long-range dependencies, Ramachandran et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

Attention layers are an integral part of modern end-to-end automatic speech recognition systems, for instance as part of the Transformer or Conformer architecture. Attention is typically multi-headed, where each head has an independent set…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Kartik Audhkhasi , Yinghui Huang , Bhuvana Ramabhadran , Pedro J. Moreno

Multi-headed attention heads are a mainstay in transformer-based models. Different methods have been proposed to classify the role of each attention head based on the relations between tokens which have high pair-wise attention. These roles…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-25 Madhura Pande , Aakriti Budhraja , Preksha Nema , Pratyush Kumar , Mitesh M. Khapra

Co-training, extended from self-training, is one of the frameworks for semi-supervised learning. Without natural split of features, single-view co-training works at the cost of training extra classifiers, where the algorithm should be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Mingcai Chen , Yuntao Du , Yi Zhang , Shuwei Qian , Chongjun Wang