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Vision Transformers (ViTs) have shown impressive performance but still require a high computation cost as compared to convolutional neural networks (CNNs), one reason is that ViTs' attention measures global similarities and thus has a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Haoran You , Yunyang Xiong , Xiaoliang Dai , Bichen Wu , Peizhao Zhang , Haoqi Fan , Peter Vajda , Yingyan Celine Lin

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

Vision Transformer (ViT) has become a leading tool in various computer vision tasks, owing to its unique self-attention mechanism that learns visual representations explicitly through cross-patch information interactions. Despite having…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-14 Jie Ma , Yalong Bai , Bineng Zhong , Wei Zhang , Ting Yao , Tao Mei

Transformers based on the attention mechanism have achieved impressive success in various areas. However, the attention mechanism has a quadratic complexity, significantly impeding Transformers from dealing with numerous tokens and scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Haixu Wu , Jialong Wu , Jiehui Xu , Jianmin Wang , Mingsheng Long

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

Deep Learning models like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are powerful image classifiers, but what factors determine whether they attend to similar image areas as humans do? While previous studies have focused on technological factors,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Romy Müller , Marcel Dürschmidt , Julian Ullrich , Carsten Knoll , Sascha Weber , Steffen Seitz

Recently multimodal transformer models have gained popularity because their performance on language and vision tasks suggest they learn rich visual-linguistic representations. Focusing on zero-shot image retrieval tasks, we study three…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Lisa Anne Hendricks , John Mellor , Rosalia Schneider , Jean-Baptiste Alayrac , Aida Nematzadeh

Attention is fundamental to cognition, yet it remains a challenge to understand attention in tasks approaching real-world complexity. Here, we approached this problem by modeling gaze patterns of monkeys playing Pac-Man. We first show a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-12 Zhongqiao Lin , Yunwei Li , Tianming Yang

Impressive performance of Transformer has been attributed to self-attention, where dependencies between entire input in a sequence are considered at every position. In this work, we reform the neural $n$-gram model, which focuses on only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Mengsay Loem , Sho Takase , Masahiro Kaneko , Naoaki Okazaki

Vision transformers have shown great success on numerous computer vision tasks. However, its central component, softmax attention, prohibits vision transformers from scaling up to high-resolution images, due to both the computational…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Weixuan Sun , Zhen Qin , Hui Deng , Jianyuan Wang , Yi Zhang , Kaihao Zhang , Nick Barnes , Stan Birchfield , Lingpeng Kong , Yiran Zhong

The dot product self-attention is known to be central and indispensable to state-of-the-art Transformer models. But is it really required? This paper investigates the true importance and contribution of the dot product-based self-attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Yi Tay , Dara Bahri , Donald Metzler , Da-Cheng Juan , Zhe Zhao , Che Zheng

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

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

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

Transformers have recently demonstrated strong performance in computer vision, with Vision Transformers (ViTs) leveraging self-attention to capture both low-level and high-level image features. However, standard ViTs remain computationally…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Ali El Bellaj , Mohammed-Amine Cheddadi , Rhassan Berber