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Transformer model with multi-head attention requires caching intermediate results for efficient inference in generation tasks. However, cache brings new memory-related costs and prevents leveraging larger batch size for faster speed. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Yu Yan , Jiusheng Chen , Weizhen Qi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Yeyun Gong , Nan Duan , Ruofei Zhang

In this work, we upgrade the multi-head attention mechanism, the core of the Transformer model, to improve efficiency while maintaining or surpassing the previous accuracy level. We show that multi-head attention can be expressed in the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Peng Jin , Bo Zhu , Li Yuan , Shuicheng Yan

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

The self-attention module is a key component of Transformer-based models, wherein each token pays attention to every other token. Recent studies have shown that these heads exhibit syntactic, semantic, or local behaviour. Some studies have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Madhura Pande , Aakriti Budhraja , Preksha Nema , Pratyush Kumar , Mitesh M. Khapra

The Transformer is a highly successful deep learning model that has revolutionised the world of artificial neural networks, first in natural language processing and later in computer vision. This model is based on the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Ughi , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Matteucci

Multilayer transformer networks consist of interleaved self-attention and feedforward sublayers. Could ordering the sublayers in a different pattern lead to better performance? We generate randomly ordered transformers and train them with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Ofir Press , Noah A. Smith , Omer Levy

Recently, Transformer based models have shown competitive automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. One key factor in the success of these models is the multi-head attention mechanism. However, for trained models, we have previously…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Keqi Deng , Philip C. Woodland

Attention is a cornerstone of human cognition that facilitates the efficient extraction of information in everyday life. Recent developments in artificial intelligence like the Transformer architecture also incorporate the idea of attention…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2024-07-03 Minglu Zhao , Dehong Xu , Tao Gao

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

Multi-Head Attention (MHA) is a key component of Transformer. In MHA, attention heads work independently, causing problems such as low-rank bottleneck of attention score matrices and head redundancy. We propose Dynamically Composable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Da Xiao , Qingye Meng , Shengping Li , Xingyuan Yuan

Transformer models rely on self-attention to capture token dependencies but face challenges in effectively integrating positional information while allowing multi-head attention (MHA) flexibility. Prior methods often model semantic and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Jintian Shao , Hongyi Huang , Jiayi Wu , Beiwen Zhang , ZhiYu Wu , You Shan , MingKai Zheng

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

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Self-attention in Transformers comes with a high computational cost because of their quadratic computational complexity, but their effectiveness in addressing problems in language and vision has sparked extensive research aimed at enhancing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Tobias Christian Nauen , Sebastian Palacio , Federico Raue , Andreas Dengel

Attention mechanisms, especially self-attention, have played an increasingly important role in deep feature representation for visual tasks. Self-attention updates the feature at each position by computing a weighted sum of features using…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Meng-Hao Guo , Zheng-Ning Liu , Tai-Jiang Mu , Shi-Min Hu

This paper studies a text classification algorithm based on an improved Transformer to improve the performance and efficiency of the model in text classification tasks. Aiming at the shortcomings of the traditional Transformer model in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-24 Jia Gao , Guiran Liu , Binrong Zhu , Shicheng Zhou , Hongye Zheng , Xiaoxuan Liao

Transformer plays a central role in many fundamental deep learning models, e.g., the ViT in computer vision and the BERT and GPT in natural language processing, whose effectiveness is mainly attributed to its multi-head attention (MHA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Shen Yuan , Hongteng Xu

Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mechanisms are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Tan M. Nguyen , Tam Nguyen , Nhat Ho , Andrea L. Bertozzi , Richard G. Baraniuk , Stanley J. Osher