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Multi-head attention plays a crucial role in the recent success of Transformer models, which leads to consistent performance improvements over conventional attention in various applications. The popular belief is that this effectiveness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-18 Liyuan Liu , Jialu Liu , Jiawei Han

We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Jianliang He , Xintian Pan , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

Planning is a crucial element of both human intelligence and contemporary large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we initiate a theoretical investigation into the emergence of planning capabilities in Transformer-based LLMs via their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Siwei Wang , Yifei Shen , Shi Feng , Haoran Sun , Shang-Hua Teng , Wei Chen

State-of-the-art results on neural machine translation often use attentional sequence-to-sequence models with some form of convolution or recursion. Vaswani et al. (2017) propose a new architecture that avoids recurrence and convolution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Karim Ahmed , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

Why do large pre-trained transformer-based models perform so well across a wide variety of NLP tasks? Recent research suggests the key may lie in multi-headed attention mechanism's ability to learn and represent linguistic information.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Zijie J. Wang , Robert Turko , Duen Horng Chau

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

Transformer has achieved great success in NLP. However, the quadratic complexity of the self-attention mechanism in Transformer makes it inefficient in handling long sequences. Many existing works explore to accelerate Transformers by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Chuhan Wu , Fangzhao Wu , Tao Qi , Binxing Jiao , Daxin Jiang , Yongfeng Huang , Xing Xie

The powerful modeling capabilities of all-attention-based transformer architectures often cause overfitting and - for natural language processing tasks - lead to an implicitly learned internal language model in the autoregressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Timo Lohrenz , Björn Möller , Zhengyang Li , Tim Fingscheidt

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

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

Transformers have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their monolithic architecture presents challenges in interpretability, adaptability, and scalability. This paper introduces a novel modular Transformer architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Zhenyu Guo , Wenguang Chen

Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

Training stability is of great importance to Transformers. In this work, we investigate the training dynamics of Transformers by examining the evolution of the attention layers. In particular, we track the attention entropy for each…

Recognition and reasoning are two pillars of visual understanding. However, these tasks have an imbalance in focus; whereas recent advances in neural networks have shown strong empirical performance in visual recognition, there has been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Calvin Luo , Boqing Gong , Ting Chen , Chen Sun

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are able to perform complex reasoning without explicit fine-tuning. To understand how pre-training with a next-token prediction objective contributes to the emergence of such reasoning capability, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Xinyi Wang , Alfonso Amayuelas , Kexun Zhang , Liangming Pan , Wenhu Chen , William Yang Wang

In mechanistic interpretability, recent work scrutinizes transformer "circuits" - sparse, mono or multi layer sub computations, that may reflect human understandable functions. Yet, these network circuits are rarely acid-tested for their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Karan Bali , Jack Stanley , Praneet Suresh , Danilo Bzdok

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

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev