Related papers: Pretraining Without Attention
Spiking neural networks (SNNs) take inspiration from the brain to enable energy-efficient computations. Since the advent of Transformers, SNNs have struggled to compete with artificial networks on modern sequential tasks, as they inherit…
This study delves into the effectiveness of various learning methods in improving Transformer models, focusing particularly on the Gated Residual Network Transformer (GRN-Transformer) in the context of pediatric intensive care units (PICU)…
We study architectural and optimization techniques for sample-efficient language modeling under the constraints of the BabyLM 2025 shared task. Our model, BLaLM, replaces self-attention with a linear-time mLSTM token mixer and explores…
Foundation models, now powering most of the exciting applications in deep learning, are almost universally based on the Transformer architecture and its core attention module. Many subquadratic-time architectures such as linear attention,…
Attention layers apply a sequence-to-sequence mapping whose parameters depend on the pairwise interactions of the input elements. However, without any structural assumptions, memory and compute scale quadratically with the sequence length.…
Self-attention has recently been adopted for a wide range of sequence modeling problems. Despite its effectiveness, self-attention suffers from quadratic compute and memory requirements with respect to sequence length. Successful approaches…
Transformers with linear recurrent modeling offer linear-time training and constant-memory inference. Despite their demonstrated efficiency and performance, pretraining such non-standard architectures from scratch remains costly and risky.…
Linear attention Transformers and their gated variants, celebrated for enabling parallel training and efficient recurrent inference, still fall short in recall-intensive tasks compared to traditional Transformers and demand significant…
Vision Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many visual tasks. Due to the quadratic computational and memory complexities of self-attention, recent works either apply attention only to low-resolution inputs or restrict…
Neural Processes (NPs) are a rapidly evolving class of models designed to directly model the posterior predictive distribution of stochastic processes. While early architectures were developed primarily as a scalable alternative to Gaussian…
This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…
We propose a Bayesian framework for training binary and spiking neural networks that achieves state-of-the-art performance without normalisation layers. Unlike commonly used surrogate gradient methods -- often heuristic and sensitive to…
State space models (SSMs) have shown impressive results on tasks that require modeling long-range dependencies and efficiently scale to long sequences owing to their subquadratic runtime complexity. Originally designed for continuous…
Foundational models based on the transformer architecture are currently the state-of-the-art in general language modeling, as well as in scientific areas such as material science and climate. However, training and deploying these models is…
Transformer models have achieved superior performance in various natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic computational cost of the attention mechanism limits its practicality for long sequences. There are existing…
Structured State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as compelling alternatives to Transformer architectures, offering linear-time complexity and superior performance in various sequence modeling tasks. Despite their advantages, SSMs like the…
Transformers-based models, such as BERT, have been one of the most successful deep learning models for NLP. Unfortunately, one of their core limitations is the quadratic dependency (mainly in terms of memory) on the sequence length due to…
In sequence learning tasks such as language modelling, Recurrent Neural Networks must learn relationships between input features separated by time. State of the art models such as LSTM and Transformer are trained by backpropagation of…
Transformer architecture has been very successful long runner in the field of Deep Learning (DL) and Large Language Models (LLM) because of its powerful attention-based learning and parallel-natured architecture. As the models grow gigantic…
Prior work on language model pre-training has explored different architectures and learning objectives, but differences in data, hyperparameters and evaluation make a principled comparison difficult. In this work, we focus on…