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This work introduces an efficient method to scale Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) to infinitely long inputs with bounded memory and computation. A key component in our proposed approach is a new attention technique dubbed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Tsendsuren Munkhdalai , Manaal Faruqui , Siddharth Gopal

The transformer structure employed in large language models (LLMs), as a specialized category of deep neural networks (DNNs) featuring attention mechanisms, stands out for their ability to identify and highlight the most relevant aspects of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Matin Mortaheb , Erciyes Karakaya , Mohammad A. Amir Khojastepour , Sennur Ulukus

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved various aspects of our daily lives. These models have impacted numerous domains, from healthcare to education, enhancing productivity, decision-making processes, and accessibility. As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zhao Song , Guangyi Xu , Junze Yin

The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Álvaro Rodríguez Abella , João Pedro Silvestre , Paulo Tabuada

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-26 Jie Ren , Qipeng Guo , Hang Yan , Dongrui Liu , Quanshi Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language understanding, yet how they internally integrate visual and textual information remains poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we perform a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Shezheng Song , Shasha Li , Jie Yu

Transformers are deep architectures that define "in-context mappings" which enable predicting new tokens based on a given set of tokens (such as a prompt in NLP applications or a set of patches for a vision transformer). In this work, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Takashi Furuya , Maarten V. de Hoop , Gabriel Peyré

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

Existing work has analyzed the representational capacity of the transformer architecture by means of formal models of computation. However, the focus so far has been on analyzing the architecture in terms of language \emph{acceptance}. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Anej Svete , Ryan Cotterell

Bidirectional transformers are the foundation of many sequence modeling tasks across natural, biological, and chemical language domains, but they are permutation-invariant without explicit positional embeddings. In contrast, unidirectional…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2026-04-22 Logan Hallee , Jason P. Gleghorn

Transformers have become a standard neural network architecture for many NLP problems, motivating theoretical analysis of their power in terms of formal languages. Recent work has shown that transformers with hard attention are quite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-12 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal , Noah A. Smith

In this work, we propose a training-free method to inject visual prompts into Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) through test-time optimization of a learnable latent variable. We observe that attention, as the core module of MLLMs,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-01-08 Mingrui Wu , Xinyue Cai , Jiayi Ji , Jiale Li , Oucheng Huang , Gen Luo , Hao Fei , Guannan Jiang , Xiaoshuai Sun , Rongrong Ji

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Lorenzo Basile , Valentino Maiorca , Diego Doimo , Francesco Locatello , Alberto Cazzaniga

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Shunjie Wang , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

Language recognition tasks are fundamental in natural language processing (NLP) and have been widely used to benchmark the performance of large language models (LLMs). These tasks also play a crucial role in explaining the working…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

Despite their empirical success, the internal mechanism by which transformer models align tokens during language processing remains poorly understood. This paper provides a mechanistic and theoretical explanation of token alignment in LLMs.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Hadi Daneshmand

The use of positional embeddings in transformer language models is widely accepted. However, recent research has called into question the necessity of such embeddings. We further extend this inquiry by demonstrating that a randomly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Ta-Chung Chi , Ting-Han Fan , Li-Wei Chen , Alexander I. Rudnicky , Peter J. Ramadge

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in visual understanding. This impressive leap raises a compelling question: how can language models, initially trained solely on…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Jing Bi , Junjia Guo , Yunlong Tang , Lianggong Bruce Wen , Zhang Liu , Chenliang Xu

The decoder-only Transformer architecture with causal masking and relative position encoding (RPE) has become the de facto choice in language modeling. Despite its exceptional performance across various tasks, we have identified two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Qingyu Yin , Xuzheng He , Xiang Zhuang , Yu Zhao , Jianhua Yao , Xiaoyu Shen , Qiang Zhang