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Transformers have revolutionized machine learning with their simple yet effective architecture. Pre-training Transformers on massive text datasets from the Internet has led to unmatched generalization for natural language understanding…

Transformers with linearised attention (''linear Transformers'') have demonstrated the practical scalability and effectiveness of outer product-based Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) from the '90s. However, the original FWP formulation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Kazuki Irie , Imanol Schlag , Róbert Csordás , Jürgen Schmidhuber

We show the formal equivalence of linearised self-attention mechanisms and fast weight controllers from the early '90s, where a ``slow" neural net learns by gradient descent to program the ``fast weights" of another net through sequences of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Imanol Schlag , Kazuki Irie , Jürgen Schmidhuber

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

The Transformer architecture has achieved tremendous success in natural language processing, computer vision, and scientific computing through its self-attention mechanism. However, its core components-positional encoding and attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Xianshuai Shi , Jianfeng Zhu , Leibo Liu

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

While convolutional neural networks have shown a tremendous impact on various computer vision tasks, they generally demonstrate limitations in explicitly modeling long-range dependencies due to the intrinsic locality of the convolution…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-06 Guanglei Yang , Hao Tang , Mingli Ding , Nicu Sebe , Elisa Ricci

The Transformer is an extremely powerful and prominent deep learning architecture. In this work, we challenge the commonly held belief in deep learning that going deeper is better, and show an alternative design approach that is building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins

The capabilities of transformer networks such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured the world's attention. The crucial computational mechanism underlying their performance relies on transforming a complete input…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Lyle Muller , Patricia S. Churchland , Terrence J. Sejnowski

Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning capabilities, prompting extensive research into its underlying mechanisms. Recent studies have suggested that Transformers can implement first-order optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Angeliki Giannou , Liu Yang , Tianhao Wang , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Jason D. Lee

Transformers have emerged as a widely used neural network model for various natural language processing tasks. Previous research explored their relationship with constant-depth threshold circuits, making two assumptions: average-hard…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-23 Lena Strobl

We introduce a new construction of embeddings of arbitrary recursive data structures into high dimensional vectors. These embeddings provide an interpretable model for the latent state vectors of transformers. We demonstrate that these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Joshua Maher

State of the art sequence-to-sequence models for large scale tasks perform a fixed number of computations for each input sequence regardless of whether it is easy or hard to process. In this paper, we train Transformer models which can make…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Maha Elbayad , Jiatao Gu , Edouard Grave , Michael Auli

Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wei Shi , Yuan Cao

This paper investigates the learning theory of Transformer networks for regression tasks on the compact Euclidean domain $[0,1]^d$ and $d$-dimensional compact Riemannian manifolds. We propose a novel constructive approximation framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-12 Zhongjie Shi , Wenjing Liao

Looped Transformers have shown exceptional neural algorithmic reasoning capability in simulating traditional graph algorithms, but their application to more complex structures like hypergraphs remains underexplored. Hypergraphs generalize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Zekai Huang , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Zhen Zhuang

The poor performance of transformers on arithmetic tasks seems to stem in large part from their inability to keep track of the exact position of each digit inside of a large span of digits. We mend this problem by adding an embedding to…

The quadratic computational and memory complexities of the Transformer's attention mechanism have limited its scalability for modeling long sequences. In this paper, we propose Luna, a linear unified nested attention mechanism that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-04 Xuezhe Ma , Xiang Kong , Sinong Wang , Chunting Zhou , Jonathan May , Hao Ma , Luke Zettlemoyer

Transformers excel empirically on tasks that process well-formed inputs according to some grammar, such as natural language and code. However, it remains unclear how they can process grammatical syntax. In fact, under standard complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Selim Jerad , Anej Svete , Sophie Hao , Ryan Cotterell , William Merrill

We give a novel logical characterization of encoder-decoder transformers, the foundational architecture for LLMs that also sees use in various settings that benefit from cross-attention. We study such transformers over text in the practical…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Veeti Ahvonen , Damian Heiman , Antti Kuusisto , Miguel Moreno , Matias Selin
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