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Related papers: Transformers from an Optimization Perspective

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Transformers are neural networks that revolutionized natural language processing and machine learning. They process sequences of inputs, like words, using a mechanism called self-attention, which is trained via masked language modeling…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-04-17 Riccardo Rende , Federica Gerace , Alessandro Laio , Sebastian Goldt

Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Ruoxi Yu , Haotian Jiang , Jingpu Cheng , Penghao Yu , Qianxiao Li , Zhong Li

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

Transformer has significantly propelled the development of artificial intelligence, and certainly the development of agents as well. We categorize attention structures of Transformer into two types based on the source of the input…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yongjin Cui , Xiaohui Fan , Huajun Chen

The Transformer model has achieved state-of-the-art performance in many sequence modeling tasks. However, how to leverage model capacity with large or variable depths is still an open challenge. We present a probabilistic framework to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Xian Li , Asa Cooper Stickland , Yuqing Tang , Xiang Kong

Transformer is a promising neural network learner, and has achieved great success in various machine learning tasks. Thanks to the recent prevalence of multimodal applications and big data, Transformer-based multimodal learning has become a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Peng Xu , Xiatian Zhu , David A. Clifton

We show that a constant number of self-attention layers can efficiently simulate, and be simulated by, a constant number of communication rounds of Massively Parallel Computation. As a consequence, we show that logarithmic depth is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

In this paper, we consider the supervised pre-trained transformer for a class of sequential decision-making problems. The class of considered problems is a subset of the general formulation of reinforcement learning in that there is no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Hanzhao Wang , Yu Pan , Fupeng Sun , Shang Liu , Kalyan Talluri , Guanting Chen , Xiaocheng Li

Transformers have been at the heart of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV) revolutions. The significant success in NLP and CV inspired exploring the use of Transformers in point cloud processing. However, how do…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-22 Dening Lu , Qian Xie , Mingqiang Wei , Kyle Gao , Linlin Xu , Jonathan Li

State-of-the-art deep learning models for computer vision tasks are based on the transformer architecture and often deployed in real-time applications. In this scenario, the resources available for every inference can vary, so it is useful…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Kavya Sreedhar , Jason Clemons , Rangharajan Venkatesan , Stephen W. Keckler , Mark Horowitz

In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tiberiu Musat

Machine Learning algorithms have had a profound impact on the field of computer science over the past few decades. These algorithms performance is greatly influenced by the representations that are derived from the data in the learning…

Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success, but their core components, Transformer layers, are largely heuristics-driven and engineered from the bottom up, calling for a prototypical model with high interpretability and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Yunzhe Hu , Difan Zou , Dong Xu

Deeply-learned planning methods are often based on learning representations that are optimized for unrelated tasks. For example, they might be trained on reconstructing the environment. These representations are then combined with predictor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Hlynur Davíð Hlynsson , Merlin Schüler , Robin Schiewer , Tobias Glasmachers , Laurenz Wiskott

We investigate whether transformers use their depth adaptively across tasks of increasing difficulty. Using a controlled multi-hop relational reasoning task based on family stories, where difficulty is determined by the number of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Alicia Curth , Rachel Lawrence , Sushrut Karmalkar , Niranjani Prasad

The usage of transformers has grown from learning about language semantics to forming meaningful visiolinguistic representations. These architectures are often over-parametrized, requiring large amounts of computation. In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-07-09 Prajjwal Bhargava

Transformers have had a significant impact on natural language processing and have recently demonstrated their potential in computer vision. They have shown promising results over convolution neural networks in fundamental computer vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Rojina Kashefi , Leili Barekatain , Mohammad Sabokrou , Fatemeh Aghaeipoor

Machine learning is usually defined in behaviourist terms, where external validation is the primary mechanism of learning. In this paper, I argue for a more holistic interpretation in which finding more probable, efficient and abstract…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Johan Loeckx

Contrastive Learning (CL) has emerged as a powerful method for training feature extraction models using unlabeled data. Recent studies suggest that incorporating a linear projection head post-backbone significantly enhances model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Huanran Li , Daniel Pimentel-Alarcón

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang