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This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

In this paper, we share our reflections and insights on understanding Transformer architectures through the lens of associative memory--a classic psychological concept inspired by human cognition. We start with the basics of associative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shu Zhong , Mingyu Xu , Tenglong Ao , Guang Shi

Transformers have become the de-facto standard model in artificial intelligence since 2017 despite numerous shortcomings ranging from energy inefficiency to hallucinations. Research has made a lot of progress in improving elements of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-02 Johannes Schneider

The Transformer, a breakthrough architecture in artificial intelligence, owes its success to the attention mechanism, which utilizes long-range interactions in sequential data, enabling the emergent coherence between large language models…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Zihan Zhou , Bo-Wei Qin , Kai Du , Wei Lin

Transformers have recently gained attention in the computer vision domain due to their ability to model long-range dependencies. However, the self-attention mechanism, which is the core part of the Transformer model, usually suffers from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Reza Azad , René Arimond , Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam , Amirhossein Kazerouni , Dorit Merhof

A Transformer-based deep direct sampling method is proposed for electrical impedance tomography, a well-known severely ill-posed nonlinear boundary value inverse problem. A real-time reconstruction is achieved by evaluating the learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Ruchi Guo , Shuhao Cao , Long Chen

Despite the advantageous subquadratic complexity of modern recurrent deep learning models -- such as state-space models (SSMs) -- recent studies have highlighted their potential shortcomings compared to transformers on reasoning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Destiny Okpekpe , Antonio Orvieto

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning in numerous fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Their strength lies in their attention mechanism, which allows for the discovering of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Uladzislau Yorsh , Martin Holeňa , Ondřej Bojar , David Herel

Transformers underpin modern large language models (LLMs) and are commonly assumed to be behaviorally unstructured at random initialization, with all meaningful preferences emerging only through large-scale training. We challenge this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-06 Siquan Li , Yao Tong , Haonan Wang , Tianyang Hu

The Transformer architecture has significantly advanced deep learning, particularly in natural language processing, by effectively managing long-range dependencies. However, as the demand for understanding complex relationships grows,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Qian Chen , Wen Wang , Qinglin Zhang , Siqi Zheng , Shiliang Zhang , Chong Deng , Hai Yu , Jiaqing Liu , Yukun Ma , Chong Zhang

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

Transformer architectures, and their attention mechanisms in particular, form the foundation of modern large language models. While transformer models are widely believed to operate in high-dimensional hidden spaces, we show that attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Junxuan Wang , Xuyang Ge , Wentao Shu , Zhengfu He , Xipeng Qiu

Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Martin Courtois , Malte Ostendorff , Leonhard Hennig , Georg Rehm

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-06 Guanglei Yang , Hao Tang , Mingli Ding , Nicu Sebe , Elisa Ricci

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

Transformers are the mainstream of NLP applications and are becoming increasingly popular in other domains such as Computer Vision. Despite the improvements in model quality, the enormous computation costs make Transformers difficult at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-22 Liu Liu , Zheng Qu , Zhaodong Chen , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

Attention mechanisms, which enable a neural network to accurately focus on all the relevant elements of the input, have become an essential component to improve the performance of deep neural networks. There are mainly two attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Qing-Long Zhang Yu-Bin Yang