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Natural language processing has greatly benefited from the introduction of the attention mechanism. However, standard attention models are of limited interpretability for tasks that involve a series of inference steps. We describe an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Martin Tutek , Jan Šnajder

Interpreting the decisions of complex computer vision models is crucial to establish trust and accountability, especially in safety-critical domains. An established approach to interpretability is generating visual attribution maps that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-08 David Schinagl , Christian Fruhwirth-Reisinger , Alexander Prutsch , Samuel Schulter , Horst Possegger

This work presents a new classifier that is specifically designed to be fully interpretable. This technique determines the probability of a class outcome, based directly on probability assignments measured from the training data. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-31 Sapan Agarwal , Corey M. Hudson

We study conditions under which transformers using soft attention can simulate hard attention, that is, effectively focus all attention on a subset of positions. First, we examine several subclasses of languages recognized by hard-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Andy Yang , Lena Strobl , David Chiang , Dana Angluin

Many recent deep learning-based solutions have widely adopted the attention-based mechanism in various tasks of the NLP discipline. However, the inherent characteristics of deep learning models and the flexibility of the attention mechanism…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Dairui Liu , Derek Greene , Ruihai Dong

Pairwise dot-product self-attention is key to the success of transformers that achieve state-of-the-art performance across a variety of applications in language and vision. This dot-product self-attention computes attention weights among…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Stefan K. Nielsen , Laziz U. Abdullaev , Rachel S. Y. Teo , Tan M. Nguyen

In this paper, we derive closed-form estimators for the parameters of some probability distributions belonging to the exponential family. A bootstrap bias-reduced version of these proposed closed-form estimators are also derived. A Monte…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-05-24 Roberto Vila , Eduardo Nakano , Helton Saulo

Attention is fundamental to cognition, yet it remains a challenge to understand attention in tasks approaching real-world complexity. Here, we approached this problem by modeling gaze patterns of monkeys playing Pac-Man. We first show a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-12 Zhongqiao Lin , Yunwei Li , Tianming Yang

We show that the standard discrete update rule of transformer layers can be naturally interpreted as a forward Euler discretization of a continuous dynamical system. Our Transformer Flow Approximation Theorem demonstrates that, under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Jacob Fein-Ashley

We characterize the pre-softmax attention matrix $\mathbf{QK^\top}$ in transformers as an associative memory matrix encoding pairwise associations between input features. By decomposing this matrix into its symmetric and skew-symmetric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Hyunmin Cho , Woo Kyoung Han , Kyong Hwan Jin

Tabular data are omnipresent in various sectors of industries. Neural networks for tabular data such as TabNet have been proposed to make predictions while leveraging the attention mechanism for interpretability. However, the inferred…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jacob Si , Wendy Yusi Cheng , Michael Cooper , Rahul G. Krishnan

In this paper we propose a neural network model with a novel Sequential Attention layer that extends soft attention by assigning weights to words in an input sequence in a way that takes into account not just how well that word matches a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-28 Sebastian Brarda , Philip Yeres , Samuel R. Bowman

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

While self-attention has been instrumental in the success of Transformers, it can lead to over-concentration on a few tokens during training, resulting in suboptimal information flow. Enforcing doubly-stochastic constraints in attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Ashkan Shahbazi , Elaheh Akbari , Darian Salehi , Xinran Liu , Navid Naderializadeh , Soheil Kolouri

Translation equivariance is a fundamental inductive bias in image restoration, ensuring that translated inputs produce translated outputs. Attention mechanisms in modern restoration transformers undermine this property, adversely impacting…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-24 JiaKui Hu , Zhengjian Yao , Lujia Jin , Hangzhou He , Yanye Lu

Attention architectures are widely used; they recently gained renewed popularity with Transformers yielding a streak of state of the art results. Yet, the geometrical implications of softmax-attention remain largely unexplored. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-20 Oliver Richter , Roger Wattenhofer

Self-supervised learning aims to extract meaningful features from unlabeled data for further downstream tasks. In this paper, we consider classification as a downstream task in phase 2 and develop rigorous theories to realize the factors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Ngoc N. Tran , Son Duong , Hoang Phan , Tung Pham , Dinh Phung , Trung Le

We propose a cross-attention Transformer for joint decoding of uplink OFDM signals received by multiple coordinated access points. A shared per-receiver encoder learns the time-frequency structure of each grid, and a token-wise…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-08 Xavier Tardy , Grégoire Lefebvre , Apostolos Kountouris , Haïfa Fares , Amor Nafkha

This paper investigates approximation-theoretic aspects of the in-context learning capability of the transformers in representing a family of noisy linear dynamical systems. Our first theoretical result establishes an upper bound on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Frank Cole , Yuxuan Zhao , Yulong Lu , Tianhao Zhang

Transformers have become a default architecture in computer vision, but understanding what drives their predictions remains a challenging problem. Current explanation approaches rely on attention values or input gradients, but these provide…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Ian Covert , Chanwoo Kim , Su-In Lee
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