Related papers: A Probabilistic Interpretation of Transformers
Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…
We propose a probabilistic interpretation of transformers as unrolled inference steps assuming a probabilistic Laplacian Eigenmaps model from the ProbDR framework. Our derivation shows that at initialisation, transformers perform "linear"…
We introduce the $2$-simplicial Transformer, an extension of the Transformer which includes a form of higher-dimensional attention generalising the dot-product attention, and uses this attention to update entity representations with tensor…
We provide a probabilistic interpretation of attention and show that the standard dot-product attention in transformers is a special case of Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) inference. The proposed approach suggests the use of Expectation…
Transformers are extremely successful machine learning models whose mathematical properties remain poorly understood. Here, we rigorously characterize the behavior of transformers with hardmax self-attention and normalization sublayers as…
We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…
Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…
An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…
Language recognition tasks are fundamental in natural language processing (NLP) and have been widely used to benchmark the performance of large language models (LLMs). These tasks also play a crucial role in explaining the working…
Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…
We argue that all building blocks of transformer models can be expressed with a single concept: combinatorial Hopf algebra. Transformer learning emerges as a result of the subtle interplay between the algebraic and coalgebraic operations of…
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…
Multi-layer models with multiple attention heads per layer provide superior translation quality compared to simpler and shallower models, but determining what source context is most relevant to each target word is more challenging as a…
This paper introduces a high-order Markov chain task to investigate how transformers learn to integrate information from multiple past positions with varying statistical significance. We demonstrate that transformers learn this task…
State-of-the-art attention based models, mostly centered around the transformer architecture, solve the problem of sequence-to-sequence translation using the so-called scaled dot-product attention. While this technique is highly effective…
Although researchers' attention is more focused on the performance of Transformer models, the interpretation of Transformer can never be ignored. Gradient is widely utilized in Transformer interpretation. From the perspective of attention…
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,…
While the successes of transformers across many domains are indisputable, accurate understanding of the learning mechanics is still largely lacking. Their capabilities have been probed on benchmarks which include a variety of structured and…
We propose a graph-oriented attention-based explainability method for tabular data. Tasks involving tabular data have been solved mostly using traditional tree-based machine learning models which have the challenges of feature selection and…
Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…