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Related papers: Attention Weights in Transformer NMT Fail Aligning…

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Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Zhengxuan Wu , Thanh-Son Nguyen , Desmond C. Ong

The attention mechanism lies at the core of the transformer architecture, providing an interpretable model-internal signal that has motivated a growing interest in attention-based model explanations. Although attention weights do not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Marte Eggen , Jacob Lysnæs-Larsen , Inga Strümke

Recently, the Transformer model that is based solely on attention mechanisms, has advanced the state-of-the-art on various machine translation tasks. However, recent studies reveal that the lack of recurrence hinders its further improvement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Jie Hao , Xing Wang , Baosong Yang , Longyue Wang , Jinfeng Zhang , Zhaopeng Tu

Despite their empirical success, the internal mechanism by which transformer models align tokens during language processing remains poorly understood. This paper provides a mechanistic and theoretical explanation of token alignment in LLMs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Hadi Daneshmand

Attention mechanisms have seen wide adoption in neural NLP models. In addition to improving predictive performance, these are often touted as affording transparency: models equipped with attention provide a distribution over attended-to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Sarthak Jain , Byron C. Wallace

Transformers are increasingly dominating multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results thanks to their ability to contextualize information using the self-attention and co-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Hila Chefer , Shir Gur , Lior Wolf

Neural encoder-decoder models of machine translation have achieved impressive results, rivalling traditional translation models. However their modelling formulation is overly simplistic, and omits several key inductive biases built into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-01-07 Trevor Cohn , Cong Duy Vu Hoang , Ekaterina Vymolova , Kaisheng Yao , Chris Dyer , Gholamreza Haffari

Attention in neural machine translation provides the possibility to encode relevant parts of the source sentence at each translation step. As a result, attention is considered to be an alignment model as well. However, there is no work that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-11 Hamidreza Ghader , Christof Monz

Despite their original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, especially Transformer, are often perceived as not learning interpretable word alignments. In this paper, we show that NMT models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-01 Shuoyang Ding , Hainan Xu , Philipp Koehn

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), each token prediction is conditioned on the source sentence and the target prefix (what has been previously translated at a decoding step). However, previous work on interpretability in NMT has mainly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Javier Ferrando , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Carlos Escolano , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Interpretability is an important aspect of the trustworthiness of a model's predictions. Transformer's predictions are widely explained by the attention weights, i.e., a probability distribution generated at its self-attention unit (head).…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Rishabh Bhardwaj , Navonil Majumder , Soujanya Poria , Eduard Hovy

The most common tools for word-alignment rely on a large amount of parallel sentences, which are then usually processed according to one of the IBM model algorithms. The training data is, however, the same as for machine translation (MT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-01 Vilém Zouhar , Daria Pylypenko

Attention mechanisms represent a fundamental paradigm shift in neural network architectures, enabling models to selectively focus on relevant portions of input sequences through learned weighting functions. This monograph provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Hasi Hays

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 attention mechanisim is appealing for neural machine translation, since it is able to dynam- ically encode a source sentence by generating a alignment between a target word and source words. Unfortunately, it has been proved to be worse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-15 Lemao Liu , Masao Utiyama , Andrew Finch , Eiichiro Sumita

Most state-of-the-art neural machine translation systems, despite being different in architectural skeletons (e.g. recurrence, convolutional), share an indispensable feature: the Attention. However, most existing attention methods are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-08-17 Phi Xuan Nguyen , Shafiq Joty

Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved new state-of-the-art performance in translating ambiguous words. However, it is still unclear which component dominates the process of disambiguation. In this paper, we explore the ability of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-07 Gongbo Tang , Rico Sennrich , Joakim Nivre

While current state-of-the-art NMT models, such as RNN seq2seq and Transformers, possess a large number of parameters, they are still shallow in comparison to convolutional models used for both text and vision applications. In this work we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-06 Ankur Bapna , Mia Xu Chen , Orhan Firat , Yuan Cao , Yonghui Wu

Neural machine translation (NMT) generates the next target token given as input the previous ground truth target tokens during training while the previous generated target tokens during inference, which causes discrepancy between training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-07-22 Kaitao Song , Xu Tan , Jianfeng Lu

The state of the art in machine translation (MT) is governed by neural approaches, which typically provide superior translation accuracy over statistical approaches. However, on the closely related task of word alignment, traditional…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-06 Sarthak Garg , Stephan Peitz , Udhyakumar Nallasamy , Matthias Paulik