English
Related papers

Related papers: TLM: Token-Level Masking for Transformers

200 papers

Transformers have demonstrated exceptional performance across various domains due to their self-attention mechanism, which captures complex relationships in data. However, training on smaller datasets poses challenges, as standard attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Minhajur Rahman , Yasir Arafat

Instruction tuning is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks and commonly relies on large, diverse corpora. However, small, high-quality subsets, known as coresets, can deliver comparable or superior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Manish Nagaraj , Sakshi Choudhary , Utkarsh Saxena , Deepak Ravikumar , Kaushik Roy

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been explored as fine-grained zero-shot re-rankers by leveraging attention signals to estimate document relevance. However, existing methods either aggregate attention signals across all heads or…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuxing Tian , Fengran Mo , Zhiqi Huang , Weixu Zhang , Jian-Yun Nie

Multilingual Pre-trained Language models (multiPLMs), trained on the Masked Language Modelling (MLM) objective are commonly being used for cross-lingual tasks such as bitext mining. However, the performance of these models is still…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Aloka Fernando , Surangika Ranathunga

While transformer-based models achieve strong performance on text classification, we explore whether masking input tokens can further enhance their effectiveness. We propose token masking regularization, a simple yet theoretically motivated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xianglong Xu , John Bowen , Rojin Taheri

Transformers and large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning, with attention mechanisms at the core of their success. As the landscape of attention variants expands, so too do the challenges of optimizing their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Feiyang Chen , Yu Cheng , Lei Wang , Yuqing Xia , Ziming Miao , Lingxiao Ma , Fan Yang , Jilong Xue , Zhi Yang , Mao Yang , Haibo Chen

We present a simple regularization technique for Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) units. Dropout, the most successful technique for regularizing neural networks, does not work well with RNNs and LSTMs. In…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-02-20 Wojciech Zaremba , Ilya Sutskever , Oriol Vinyals

Self-attention mechanism is the key of the Transformer but often criticized for its computation demands. Previous token pruning works motivate their methods from the view of computation redundancy but still need to load the full network and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Sihao Lin , Pumeng Lyu , Dongrui Liu , Tao Tang , Xiaodan Liang , Andy Song , Xiaojun Chang

Prompt tuning and adapter tuning have shown great potential in transferring pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to various downstream tasks. In this work, we design a new type of tuning method, termed as regularized mask tuning, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Kecheng Zheng , Wei Wu , Ruili Feng , Kai Zhu , Jiawei Liu , Deli Zhao , Zheng-Jun Zha , Wei Chen , Yujun Shen

Among the various pre-trained neural language models that are popular today, dropout is already an indispensable regularization technique. To solve the inconsistency between training and inference caused by the randomness of dropout, some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Shiwen Ni , Min Yang , Ruifeng Xu , Chengming Li , Xiping Hu

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) process a large number of visual tokens, leading to significant computational costs and inefficiency. Instruction-related visual token compression demonstrates strong task relevance, which…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lei Lei , Jie Gu , Xiaokang Ma , Chu Tang , Jingmin Chen , Tong Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across diverse tasks but continue to struggle with learning transitive relations, a cornerstone for complex planning. To address this issue, we investigate the Multi-Token…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qimin Zhong , Hao Liao , Siwei Wang , Mingyang Zhou , Xiaoqun Wu , Rui Mao , Wei Chen

We evaluate three simple, normalization-centric changes to improve Transformer training. First, we show that pre-norm residual connections (PreNorm) and smaller initializations enable warmup-free, validation-based training with large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Toan Q. Nguyen , Julian Salazar

When training transformers on graph-structured data, incorporating information about the underlying topology is crucial for good performance. Topological masking, a type of relative position encoding, achieves this by upweighting or…

Discrete diffusion models offer global context awareness and flexible parallel generation. However, uniform random noise schedulers in standard DLLM training overlook the highly non-uniform information density inherent in real-world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Linrui Ma , Yufei Cui , Kai Han , Yunhe Wang

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly applied to pixel-level vision tasks, yet their intrinsic capacity for spatial understanding remains poorly understood. We investigate segmentation capacity through a layerwise linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Boyong Wu , Sanghwan Kim , Zeynep Akata

Recursion is a prominent feature of human language, and fundamentally challenging for self-attention due to the lack of an explicit recursive-state tracking mechanism. Consequently, Transformer language models poorly capture long-tail…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Shikhar Murty , Pratyusha Sharma , Jacob Andreas , Christopher D. Manning

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by structurally denoising their weights, yet existing techniques primarily focus on denoising the feed-forward network (FFN) of the transformer block, and can not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Yuxuan Gu , Wuyang Zhou , Giorgos Iacovides , Danilo Mandic

Transformer-based models generally allocate the same amount of computation for each token in a given sequence. We develop a simple but effective "token dropping" method to accelerate the pretraining of transformer models, such as BERT,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-03-25 Le Hou , Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Tianyi Zhou , Yuexin Wu , Xinying Song , Xiaodan Song , Denny Zhou

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs), such as long short-term memory networks (LSTMs), serve as a fundamental building block for many sequence learning tasks, including machine translation, language modeling, and question answering. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-08-09 Stephen Merity , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher