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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 study the problem of incorporating prior knowledge into a deep Transformer-based model,i.e.,Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to enhance its performance on semantic textual matching tasks. By probing and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Tingyu Xia , Yue Wang , Yuan Tian , Yi Chang

This research endeavors to offer insights into unlocking the further potential of transformer-based architectures. One of the primary motivations is to offer a geometric interpretation for the attention mechanism in transformers. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhongping Ji

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

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

The quadratic computational cost of the self-attention mechanism is a primary challenge in scaling Transformer models. While attention sparsity is widely studied as a technique to improve computational efficiency, it is almost universally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Sagar Gandhi , Vishal Gandhi

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

We investigate the extent to which individual attention heads in pretrained transformer language models, such as BERT and RoBERTa, implicitly capture syntactic dependency relations. We employ two methods---taking the maximum attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Phu Mon Htut , Jason Phang , Shikha Bordia , Samuel R. Bowman

Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Harshwardhan Fartale , Ashish Kattamuri , Rahul Raja , Arpita Vats , Ishita Prasad , Akshata Kishore Moharir

Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Martin Courtois , Malte Ostendorff , Leonhard Hennig , Georg Rehm

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

Attention-based models have shown significant improvement over traditional algorithms in several NLP tasks. The Transformer, for instance, is an illustrative example that generates abstract representations of tokens inputted to an encoder…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Dhanasekar Sundararaman , Vivek Subramanian , Guoyin Wang , Shijing Si , Dinghan Shen , Dong Wang , Lawrence Carin

The success of self-attention lies in its ability to capture long-range dependencies and enhance context understanding, but it is limited by its computational complexity and challenges in handling sequential data with inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Md Kowsher , Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Chun-Nam Yu , Ozlem Ozmen Garibay , Niloofar Yousefi

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

The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yihe Dong , Lorenzo Noci , Mikhail Khodak , Mufan Li

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

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

We introduce Attention Graphs, a new tool for mechanistic interpretability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers based on the mathematical equivalence between message passing in GNNs and the self-attention mechanism in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Batu El , Deepro Choudhury , Pietro Liò , Chaitanya K. Joshi

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Language models (LMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. We propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Mansi Sakarvadia

Recent years have seen a phenomenal rise in performance and applications of transformer neural networks. The family of transformer networks, including Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT), Generative Pretrained…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Krishna Teja Chitty-Venkata , Sparsh Mittal , Murali Emani , Venkatram Vishwanath , Arun K. Somani