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Transformers have revolutionized machine learning across diverse domains, yet understanding their behavior remains crucial, particularly in high-stakes applications. This paper introduces the contextual counting task, a novel toy problem…

Transformers demonstrate significant advantages as the building block of modern LLMs. In this work, we study the capacities of Transformers in performing unsupervised learning. We show that multi-layered Transformers, given a sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-14 Yihan He , Yuan Cao , Hong-Yu Chen , Dennis Wu , Jianqing Fan , Han Liu

Transformers often struggle with length generalization, meaning they fail to generalize to sequences longer than those encountered during training. While arithmetic tasks are commonly used to study length generalization, certain tasks are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Hanseul Cho , Jaeyoung Cha , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Chulhee Yun

The rapid progress of research aimed at interpreting the inner workings of advanced language models has highlighted a need for contextualizing the insights gained from years of work in this area. This primer provides a concise technical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Javier Ferrando , Gabriele Sarti , Arianna Bisazza , Marta R. Costa-jussà

Transformer based large-language models (LLMs) display extreme proficiency with language yet a precise understanding of how they work remains elusive. One way of demystifying transformer predictions would be to describe how they depend on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Timothy Nguyen

This document aims to be a self-contained, mathematically precise overview of transformer architectures and algorithms (*not* results). It covers what transformers are, how they are trained, what they are used for, their key architectural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-26 Mary Phuong , Marcus Hutter

Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Yuxuan Li , James L. McClelland

Deep imitation learning is promising for solving dexterous manipulation tasks because it does not require an environment model and pre-programmed robot behavior. However, its application to dual-arm manipulation tasks remains challenging.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-23 Heecheol Kim , Yoshiyuki Ohmura , Yasuo Kuniyoshi

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

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

Advanced neural machine translation (NMT) models generally implement encoder and decoder as multiple layers, which allows systems to model complex functions and capture complicated linguistic structures. However, only the top layers of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Zi-Yi Dou , Zhaopeng Tu , Xing Wang , Shuming Shi , Tong Zhang

Pretrained Transformer based models finetuned on domain specific corpora have changed the landscape of NLP. However, training or fine-tuning these models for individual tasks can be time consuming and resource intensive. Thus, a lot of…

With the rise of large-scale foundation models, efficiently adapting them to downstream tasks remains a central challenge. Linear probing, which freezes the backbone and trains a lightweight head, is computationally efficient but often…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Laure Ciernik , Marco Morik , Lukas Thede , Luca Eyring , Shinichi Nakajima , Zeynep Akata , Lukas Muttenthaler

Graph transformers are a recent advancement in machine learning, offering a new class of neural network models for graph-structured data. The synergy between transformers and graph learning demonstrates strong performance and versatility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ahsan Shehzad , Feng Xia , Shagufta Abid , Ciyuan Peng , Shuo Yu , Dongyu Zhang , Karin Verspoor

In multi-source sequence-to-sequence tasks, the attention mechanism can be modeled in several ways. This topic has been thoroughly studied on recurrent architectures. In this paper, we extend the previous work to the encoder-decoder…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-13 Jindřich Libovický , Jindřich Helcl , David Mareček

Existing methods enhance the training of detection transformers by incorporating an auxiliary one-to-many assignment. In this work, we treat the model as a multi-task framework, simultaneously performing one-to-one and one-to-many…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Chang-Bin Zhang , Yujie Zhong , Kai Han

Transformer models have emerged as potent solutions to a wide array of multidisciplinary challenges. The deployment of Transformer architectures is significantly hindered by their extensive computational and memory requirements,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Zhengxian Lu , Fangyu Wang , Zhiwei Xu , Fei Yang , Tao Li

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

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

Transformer-based models excel in various tasks but their generalization capabilities, especially in arithmetic reasoning, remain incompletely understood. Arithmetic tasks provide a controlled framework to explore these capabilities, yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Xingcheng Xu , Zibo Zhao , Haipeng Zhang , Yanqing Yang