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Attention mechanism is contributing to the majority of recent advances in machine learning for natural language processing. Additionally, it results in an attention map that shows the proportional influence of each input in its decision.…
We revisit the I/O complexity of attention in large language models. Given query-key-value matrices $Q,K,V\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, and a machine with fast memory size $M$, the goal is to compute the "attention matrix" $A=\text{softmax}(Q…
We examine the intrinsic (within the attention head) and extrinsic (amongst the attention heads) structure of the self-attention mechanism in transformers. Theoretical evidence for invariance of the self-attention mechanism to softmax…
Prompt-tuning is an emerging strategy to adapt large language models (LLM) to downstream tasks by learning a (soft-)prompt parameter from data. Despite its success in LLMs, there is limited theoretical understanding of the power of…
The success of Transformer language models is widely credited to their dot-product attention mechanism, which interweaves a set of key design principles: mixing information across positions (enabling multi-token interactions),…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of softmax attention remains a central bottleneck that limits their scalability. Alman and Song (NeurIPS…
We propose the first method to show theoretical limitations for one-layer softmax transformers with arbitrarily many precision bits (even infinite). We establish those limitations for three tasks that require advanced reasoning. The first…
Effective representation learning from text has been an active area of research in the fields of NLP and text mining. Attention mechanisms have been at the forefront in order to learn contextual sentence representations. Current…
First derived from human intuition, later adapted to machine translation for automatic token alignment, attention mechanism, a simple method that can be used for encoding sequence data based on the importance score each element is assigned,…
Vision transformers using self-attention or its proposed alternatives have demonstrated promising results in many image related tasks. However, the underpinning inductive bias of attention is not well understood. To address this issue, this…
Attention mechanisms are widely used to dramatically improve deep learning model performance in various fields. However, their general ability to improve the performance of physiological signal deep learning model is immature. In this…
The attention mechanism has been proven effective on various visual tasks in recent years. In the semantic segmentation task, the attention mechanism is applied in various methods, including the case of both Convolution Neural Networks…
Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…
Transformer attention is typically implemented using softmax normalization, which enforces attention weights with unit sum normalization. While effective in many settings, this constraint can limit flexibility in controlling attention…
Neural attention has become central to many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing and related domains. Attention networks are an easy-to-train and effective method for softly simulating alignment; however, the approach does…
The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…
In the realm of deep learning, the self-attention mechanism has substantiated its pivotal role across a myriad of tasks, encompassing natural language processing and computer vision. Despite achieving success across diverse applications,…
Transformers and deep state space models (SSMs) sit at opposite ends of a basic design choice: attention routes each query through a growing key-value (KV) cache by content-based matching at quadratic cost, while deep SSMs compress context…
Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…
We study two strange phenomena in auto-regressive Transformers: (1) the dominance of the first token in attention heads; (2) the occurrence of large outlier activations in the hidden states. We find that popular large language models, such…