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Attention-based architectures have become ubiquitous in machine learning, yet our understanding of the reasons for their effectiveness remains limited. This work proposes a new way to understand self-attention networks: we show that their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Yihe Dong , Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas

The training of deep neural networks predominantly relies on a combination of gradient-based optimisation and back-propagation for the computation of the gradient. While incredibly successful, this approach faces challenges such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Xiaoyu Wang , Alexandra Valavanis , Azhir Mahmood , Andreas Mang , Martin Benning , Audrey Repetti

Multilayer transformer networks consist of interleaved self-attention and feedforward sublayers. Could ordering the sublayers in a different pattern lead to better performance? We generate randomly ordered transformers and train them with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Ofir Press , Noah A. Smith , Omer Levy

In deep learning theory, the covariance matrix of the representations serves as a proxy to examine the network's trainability. Motivated by the success of Transformers, we study the covariance matrix of a modified Softmax-based attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-12 Lorenzo Noci , Chuning Li , Mufan Bill Li , Bobby He , Thomas Hofmann , Chris Maddison , Daniel M. Roy

Self-attention, as the key block of transformers, is a powerful mechanism for extracting features from the inputs. In essence, what self-attention does is to infer the pairwise relations between the elements of the inputs, and modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Lemeng Wu , Xingchao Liu , Qiang Liu

Attention mechanisms represent a fundamental paradigm shift in neural network architectures, enabling models to selectively focus on relevant portions of input sequences through learned weighting functions. This monograph provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Hasi Hays

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

Object Detection with Transformers (DETR) and related works reach or even surpass the highly-optimized Faster-RCNN baseline with self-attention network architectures. Inspired by the evidence that pure self-attention possesses a strong…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Wenchi Ma , Tianxiao Zhang , Guanghui Wang

The Transformer architecture has inarguably revolutionized deep learning, overtaking classical architectures like multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). At its core, the attention block differs in form and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Weronika Ormaniec , Felix Dangel , Sidak Pal Singh

The current trend of automating inspections at substations has sparked a surge in interest in the field of transformer image recognition. However, due to restrictions in the number of parameters in existing models, high-resolution images…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Siyi Zhang , Cheng Liu , Xiang Li , Xin Zhai , Zhen Wei , Sizhe Li , Xun Ma

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Venmugil Elango

Attention mechanisms, particularly channel attention, have become highly influential in numerous computer vision tasks. Despite their effectiveness, many existing methods primarily focus on optimizing performance through complex attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Ronghui Zhang , Runzong Zou , Yue Zhao , Zirui Zhang , Junzhou Chen , Yue Cao , Chuan Hu , Houbing Song

Image generation has been successfully cast as an autoregressive sequence generation or transformation problem. Recent work has shown that self-attention is an effective way of modeling textual sequences. In this work, we generalize a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Niki Parmar , Ashish Vaswani , Jakob Uszkoreit , Łukasz Kaiser , Noam Shazeer , Alexander Ku , Dustin Tran

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nan Ding , Xinjie Fan , Zhenzhong Lan , Dale Schuurmans , Radu Soricut

Attention mechanisms that confer selective focus on a strict subset of input elements are nearly ubiquitous in language models today. We posit there to be downside to the use of attention: most input information is lost. In support of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Benjamin L. Badger

Learned optimizers -- neural networks that are trained to act as optimizers -- have the potential to dramatically accelerate training of machine learning models. However, even when meta-trained across thousands of tasks at huge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-23 James Harrison , Luke Metz , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein

Transformers have demonstrated great power in the recent development of large foundational models. In particular, the Vision Transformer (ViT) has brought revolutionary changes to the field of vision, achieving significant accomplishments…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Jiarui Jiang , Wei Huang , Miao Zhang , Taiji Suzuki , Liqiang Nie

We develop a fast, tractable technique called Net-Trim for simplifying a trained neural network. The method is a convex post-processing module, which prunes (sparsifies) a trained network layer by layer, while preserving the internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Alireza Aghasi , Afshin Abdi , Justin Romberg

The attention mechanism in its standard implementation contains extraneous rotational degrees of freedom that are carried through computation but do not affect model activations or outputs. We introduce a simple symmetry-breaking protocol…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Eva Silverstein , Daniel Kunin , Vasudev Shyam

Neural networks have been achieving high generalization performance on many tasks despite being highly over-parameterized. Since classical statistical learning theory struggles to explain this behavior, much effort has recently been focused…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-16 Skander Karkar , Ibrahim Ayed , Emmanuel de Bézenac , Patrick Gallinari