Related papers: The Shaped Transformer: Attention Models in the In…
The logit outputs of a feedforward neural network at initialization are conditionally Gaussian, given a random covariance matrix defined by the penultimate layer. In this work, we study the distribution of this random matrix. Recent work…
We propose a novel framework, Continuous_Time Attention, which infuses partial differential equations (PDEs) into the Transformer's attention mechanism to address the challenges of extremely long input sequences. Instead of relying solely…
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…
The Transformer model architecture has become one of the most widely used in deep learning and the attention mechanism is at its core. The standard attention formulation uses a softmax operation applied to a scaled dot product between query…
Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…
Transformers have achieved remarkable successes across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundation of their model efficiency remains underexplored. In this work, we investigate how the model parameters -- mainly attention…
The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…
We characterize the pre-softmax attention matrix $\mathbf{QK^\top}$ in transformers as an associative memory matrix encoding pairwise associations between input features. By decomposing this matrix into its symmetric and skew-symmetric…
To overcome the quadratic cost of self-attention, recent works have proposed various sparse attention modules, most of which fall under one of two groups: 1) sparse attention under a hand-crafted patterns and 2) full attention followed by a…
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…
We study how multi-head softmax attention models are trained to perform in-context learning on linear data. Through extensive empirical experiments and rigorous theoretical analysis, we demystify the emergence of elegant attention patterns:…
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…
Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and…
Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…
Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…
Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…
Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…
We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…
The Transformer architecture has revolutionized artificial intelligence, yet a principled theoretical understanding of its internal mechanisms remains elusive. This paper introduces a novel analytical framework that reconceptualizes the…
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…