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Related papers: Formal Algorithms for Transformers

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The advent of transformers has in recent years led to powerful and revolutionary Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite this, our understanding on the capability of transformers is still meager. In this invited contribution, we recount the…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Anthony W. Lin , Pablo Barcelo

Transformers play a central role in the inner workings of large language models. We develop a mathematical framework for analyzing Transformers based on their interpretation as interacting particle systems, which reveals that clusters…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Borjan Geshkovski , Cyril Letrouit , Yury Polyanskiy , Philippe Rigollet

Transformers are crucial across many AI fields, such as large language models, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. This prominence stems from the architecture's perceived universality and scalability compared to alternatives. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Amirreza Abbasi , Mohsen Hooshmand

Deep learning (DL) is characterised by its dynamic nature, with new deep neural network (DNN) architectures and approaches emerging every few years, driving the field's advancement. At the same time, the ever-increasing use of mobile…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ioannis Panopoulos , Sokratis Nikolaidis , Stylianos I. Venieris , Iakovos S. Venieris

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly those built on Transformer architectures, have significantly broadened the scope of natural language processing (NLP) applications, transcending their initial use in chatbot…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Chen Wang , Jin Zhao , Jiaqi Gong

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated a strong capability in modeling graph structures by addressing the intrinsic limitations of graph neural networks (GNNs), such as over-smoothing and over-squashing. Recent studies have proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Chaohao Yuan , Kangfei Zhao , Ercan Engin Kuruoglu , Liang Wang , Tingyang Xu , Wenbing Huang , Deli Zhao , Hong Cheng , Yu Rong

This paper presents Mixed Formal Learning, a new architecture that learns models based on formal mathematical representations of the domain of interest and exposes latent variables. The second element in the architecture learns a particular…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Sandra Carrico

State-of-the-art results in large language models (LLMs) often rely on scale, which becomes computationally expensive. This has sparked a research agenda to reduce these models' parameter counts and computational costs without significantly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Xiuying Wei , Skander Moalla , Razvan Pascanu , Caglar Gulcehre

Transformer becomes the state-of-the-art translation model, while it is not well studied how each intermediate component contributes to the model performance, which poses significant challenges for designing optimal architectures. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Wenxuan Wang , Zhaopeng Tu

In the past few years we have seen the meteoric appearance of dozens of foundation models of the Transformer family, all of which have memorable and sometimes funny, but not self-explanatory, names. The goal of this paper is to offer a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Xavier Amatriain , Ananth Sankar , Jie Bing , Praveen Kumar Bodigutla , Timothy J. Hazen , Michaeel Kazi

Nobody knows how language works, but many theories abound. Transformers are a class of neural networks that process language automatically with more success than alternatives, both those based on neural computations and those that rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Felix Hill

This monograph aims at providing an introduction to key concepts, algorithms, and theoretical results in machine learning. The treatment concentrates on probabilistic models for supervised and unsupervised learning problems. It introduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Osvaldo Simeone

Transformer architectures contribute to managing long-term dependencies for Natural Language Processing, representing one of the most recent changes in the field. These architectures are the basis of the innovative, cutting-edge Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Silvia García-Méndez , Francisco de Arriba-Pérez , María del Carmen Somoza-López

Artificial intelligence is making spectacular progress, and one of the best examples is the development of large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT series. In these lectures, written for readers with a background in mathematics or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Michael R. Douglas

Transformer, originally devised for natural language processing, has also attested significant success in computer vision. Thanks to its super expressive power, researchers are investigating ways to deploy transformers to reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Shengchao Hu , Li Shen , Ya Zhang , Yixin Chen , Dacheng Tao

We find limits to the Transformer architecture for language modeling and show it has a universal prediction property in an information-theoretic sense. We further analyze performance in non-asymptotic data regimes to understand the role of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Sourya Basu , Moulik Choraria , Lav R. Varshney

The general translator formalism and computing specific implementations are proposed. The implementation of specific elements necessary to process the source and destination information within the translators are presented. Some common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-23 Iosif Iulian Petrila

The rapid progress of research aimed at interpreting the inner workings of advanced language models has highlighted a need for contextualizing the insights gained from years of work in this area. This primer provides a concise technical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Javier Ferrando , Gabriele Sarti , Arianna Bisazza , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Deep learning models such as the Transformer are often constructed by heuristics and experience. To provide a complementary foundation, in this work we study the following problem: Is it possible to find an energy function underlying the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-28 Yongyi Yang , Zengfeng Huang , David Wipf

A simple design recipe for deep Transformers is to compose identical building blocks. But standard transformer blocks are far from simple, interweaving attention and MLP sub-blocks with skip connections & normalisation layers in precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Bobby He , Thomas Hofmann