English
Related papers

Related papers: Looped Transformers as Programmable Computers

200 papers

Understanding the transformer architecture and its workings is essential for machine learning (ML) engineers. However, truly understanding the transformer architecture can be demanding, even if you have a solid background in machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Joni-Kristian Kämäräinen

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

Transformers have become a standard neural network architecture for many NLP problems, motivating theoretical analysis of their power in terms of formal languages. Recent work has shown that transformers with hard attention are quite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-12 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal , Noah A. Smith

Recent work has shown that Transformers trained from scratch can successfully solve various arithmetic and algorithmic tasks, such as adding numbers and computing parity. While these Transformers generalize well on unseen inputs of the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Ying Fan , Yilun Du , Kannan Ramchandran , Kangwook Lee

Previous research has explored the computational expressivity of Transformer models in simulating Boolean circuits or Turing machines. However, the learnability of these simulators from observational data has remained an open question. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Morris Yau , Ekin Akyürek , Jiayuan Mao , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Stefanie Jegelka , Jacob Andreas

Deep Learning architectures, and in particular Transformers, are conventionally viewed as a composition of layers. These layers are actually often obtained as the sum of two contributions: a residual path that copies the input and the…

We train a linear attention transformer on millions of masked-block matrix completion tasks: each prompt is masked low-rank matrix whose missing block may be (i) a scalar prediction target or (ii) an unseen kernel slice of Nystr\"om…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Patrick Lutz , Aditya Gangrade , Hadi Daneshmand , Venkatesh Saligrama

Recent studies of the computational power of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) reveal a hierarchy of RNN architectures, given real-time and finite-precision assumptions. Here we study auto-regressive Transformers with linearised attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Kazuki Irie , Róbert Csordás , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Looped Transformers (LT) have emerged as a powerful architecture by iterating their layers multiple times before decoding the final token. However, pairing them with full attention retains quadratic complexity, making them computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chunyuan Deng , Yizhe Zhang , Rui-Jie Zhu , Yuanyuan Xu , Jiarui Liu , T. S. Eugene Ng , Hanjie Chen

The transformer has revolutionized modern AI across language, vision, and beyond. It consists of $L$ layers, each running $H$ attention heads in parallel and feeding the combined output to the subsequent layer. In attention, the input…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Barna Saha , Yinzhan Xu , Christopher Ye , Hantao Yu

Large Transformer models routinely achieve state-of-the-art results on a number of tasks but training these models can be prohibitively costly, especially on long sequences. We introduce two techniques to improve the efficiency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Nikita Kitaev , Łukasz Kaiser , Anselm Levskaya

Transformer is a deep neural network that employs a self-attention mechanism to comprehend the contextual relationships within sequential data. Unlike conventional neural networks or updated versions of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Saidul Islam , Hanae Elmekki , Ahmed Elsebai , Jamal Bentahar , Najat Drawel , Gaith Rjoub , Witold Pedrycz

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

We introduce the Block-Recurrent Transformer, which applies a transformer layer in a recurrent fashion along a sequence, and has linear complexity with respect to sequence length. Our recurrent cell operates on blocks of tokens rather than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 DeLesley Hutchins , Imanol Schlag , Yuhuai Wu , Ethan Dyer , Behnam Neyshabur

Transformers are powerful neural architectures that allow integrating different modalities using attention mechanisms. In this paper, we leverage the neural transformer architectures for multi-channel speech recognition systems, where the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-02-09 Feng-Ju Chang , Martin Radfar , Athanasios Mouchtaris , Brian King , Siegfried Kunzmann

There has been a recent surge in transformer-based architectures for learning on graphs, mainly motivated by attention as an effective learning mechanism and the desire to supersede handcrafted operators characteristic of message passing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 David Buterez , Jon Paul Janet , Dino Oglic , Pietro Lio

Large language models exhibit sophisticated capabilities, yet understanding how they work internally remains a central challenge. A fundamental obstacle is that training selects for behavior, not circuitry, so many weight configurations can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Joshua S. Schiffman

Despite their central role in the success of foundational models and large-scale language modeling, the theoretical foundations governing the operation of Transformers remain only partially understood. Contemporary research has largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Sagar Ghosh , Kushal Bose , Swagatam Das

Looped Transformers have emerged as an efficient and powerful class of models for reasoning in the language domain. Recent studies show that these models achieve strong performance on algorithmic and reasoning tasks, suggesting that looped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Ahmadreza Jeddi , Marco Ciccone , Babak Taati

The large attention-based encoder-decoder network (Transformer) has become prevailing recently due to its effectiveness. But the high computation complexity of its decoder raises the inefficiency issue. By examining the mathematic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-12 Yanyang Li , Ye Lin , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu