English
Related papers

Related papers: Revisiting Attention Weights as Explanations from …

200 papers

Recent advances in interpretability suggest we can project weights and hidden states of transformer-based language models (LMs) to their vocabulary, a transformation that makes them more human interpretable. In this paper, we investigate LM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Shahar Katz , Yonatan Belinkov

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr

The vanilla self-attention mechanism in Transformers can be viewed as a two-layer fast-weight MLP, whose weights are dynamically induced by inputs and whose hidden dimension is equal to the sequence length $N$. As the context extends, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Qishuai Wen , Zhiyuan Huang , Xianghan Meng , Wei He , Chun-Guang Li

The opacity of deep learning models constrains their debugging and improvement. Augmenting deep models with saliency-based strategies, such as attention, has been claimed to help get a better understanding of the decision-making process of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Matteo Rizzo , Cristina Conati , Daesik Jang , Hui Hu

Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Shuai Li , Zhao Song , Yu Xia , Tong Yu , Tianyi Zhou

Using attention weights to identify information that is important for models' decision-making is a popular approach to interpret attention-based neural networks. This is commonly realized in practice through the generation of a heat-map for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Tian Shi , Xuchao Zhang , Ping Wang , Chandan K. Reddy

Explaining and interpreting the decisions of recommender systems are becoming extremely relevant both, for improving predictive performance, and providing valid explanations to users. While most of the recent interest has focused on…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2019-06-19 Rishabh Jain , Pranava Madhyastha

Modern large language models become multimodal, analyzing various data formats like text and images. While fine-tuning is effective for adapting these multimodal language models (MLMs) to downstream tasks, full fine-tuning is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Alexander Sergeev , Evgeny Kotelnikov

Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Pengcheng Huang , Tianming Liu , Zhenghao Liu , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Tong Xiao , Zulong Chen , Maosong Sun

Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Seil Kang , Jinyeong Kim , Junhyeok Kim , Seong Jae Hwang

Attention mechanisms have become a foundational component in diffusion models, significantly influencing their capacity across a wide range of generative and discriminative tasks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Litao Hua , Fan Liu , Jie Su , Xingyu Miao , Zizhou Ouyang , Zeyu Wang , Runze Hu , Zhenyu Wen , Bing Zhai , Yang Long , Haoran Duan , Yuan Zhou

Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai

Attention mechanisms have been extensively employed in various applications, including time series modeling, owing to their capacity to capture intricate dependencies; however, their utility is often constrained by quadratic computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Mingtao Zhang , Guoli Yang , Zhanxing Zhu , Mengzhu Wang , Xiaoying Bai

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang

The attention mechanism has been widely used in deep neural networks as a model component. By now, it has become a critical building block in many state-of-the-art natural language models. Despite its great success established empirically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Haoye Lu , Yongyi Mao , Amiya Nayak

Attention mechanism is effective in both focusing the deep learning models on relevant features and interpreting them. However, attentions may be unreliable since the networks that generate them are often trained in a weakly-supervised…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-11 Jay Heo , Hae Beom Lee , Saehoon Kim , Juho Lee , Kwang Joon Kim , Eunho Yang , Sung Ju Hwang

Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Zhong Guan , Likang Wu , Hongke Zhao , Ming He , Jianpin Fan

Sequence models face a fundamental tradeoff between memory capacity and computational efficiency. Transformers achieve expressive context modeling at quadratic cost, while linear attention and state-space models run in linear time by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Yaxita Amin , Helen Zichen Li , Mengfan Zhang , Samet Ayhan

Time series forecasting is essential for many practical applications, with the adoption of transformer-based models on the rise due to their impressive performance in NLP and CV. Transformers' key feature, the attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 PeiSong Niu , Tian Zhou , Xue Wang , Liang Sun , Rong Jin

Although attention mechanisms have been applied to a variety of deep learning models and have been shown to improve the prediction performance, it has been reported to be vulnerable to perturbations to the mechanism. To overcome the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Shunsuke Kitada , Hitoshi Iyatomi