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Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

Transformers evaluated in a single, fixed-depth pass are provably limited in expressive power to the constant-depth circuit class TC0. Running a Transformer autoregressively removes that ceiling -- first in next-token prediction and, more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Mrinal Mathur , Mike Doan , Barak Pearlmutter , Sergey Plis

Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Mehryar Mohri

Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hung-Hsuan Chen

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

The development and adoption of Vision Transformers and other deep-learning architectures for image classification tasks has been rapid. However, the "black box" nature of neural networks is a barrier to adoption in applications where…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mariano V. Ntrougkas , Nikolaos Gkalelis , Vasileios Mezaris

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai

Transformer-based approaches have revolutionized image super-resolution by modeling long-range dependencies. However, the quadratic computational complexity of vanilla self-attention mechanisms poses significant challenges, often leading to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Dinh Phu Tran , Thao Do , Saad Wazir , Seongah Kim , Seon Kwon Kim , Daeyoung Kim

Transformer-based models have recently become wildly successful across a diverse set of domains. At the same time, recent work has shown empirically and theoretically that Transformers are inherently limited. Specifically, they argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-30 Gbètondji J-S Dovonon , Michael M. Bronstein , Matt J. Kusner

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

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

Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Hao Liu , Matei Zaharia , Pieter Abbeel

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

The quadratic complexity of dot-product attention introduced in Transformer remains a fundamental bottleneck impeding the progress of foundation models toward unbounded context lengths. Addressing this challenge, we introduce the Deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yifan Zhang

Transformers, adapted from natural language processing, are emerging as a leading approach for graph representation learning. Contemporary graph transformers often treat nodes or edges as separate tokens. This approach leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Zihan Pengmei , Zimu Li , Chih-chan Tien , Risi Kondor , Aaron R. Dinner

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Mingze Wang , Weinan E

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized deep learning on sequential data, becoming ubiquitous in state-of-the-art solutions for a wide variety of applications. Yet vanilla Transformers are notoriously resource-expensive, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-22 Valerii Likhosherstov , Krzysztof Choromanski , Jared Davis , Xingyou Song , Adrian Weller

Recently, Vision Transformer and its variants have shown great promise on various computer vision tasks. The ability of capturing short- and long-range visual dependencies through self-attention is arguably the main source for the success.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Jianwei Yang , Chunyuan Li , Pengchuan Zhang , Xiyang Dai , Bin Xiao , Lu Yuan , Jianfeng Gao

This paper aims to address the problem of supervised monocular depth estimation. We start with a meticulous pilot study to demonstrate that the long-range correlation is essential for accurate depth estimation. Therefore, we propose to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Zhenyu Li , Zehui Chen , Xianming Liu , Junjun Jiang

Time series forecasting is an important problem across many domains, including predictions of solar plant energy output, electricity consumption, and traffic jam situation. In this paper, we propose to tackle such forecasting problem with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-06 Shiyang Li , Xiaoyong Jin , Yao Xuan , Xiyou Zhou , Wenhu Chen , Yu-Xiang Wang , Xifeng Yan