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The Transformer and its variants have been proven to be efficient sequence learners in many different domains. Despite their staggering success, a critical issue has been the enormous number of parameters that must be trained (ranging from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Subhabrata Dutta , Tanya Gautam , Soumen Chakrabarti , Tanmoy Chakraborty

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee

Though U-Net has achieved tremendous success in medical image segmentation tasks, it lacks the ability to explicitly model long-range dependencies. Therefore, Vision Transformers have emerged as alternative segmentation structures recently,…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-12 Hongyi Wang , Shiao Xie , Lanfen Lin , Yutaro Iwamoto , Xian-Hua Han , Yen-Wei Chen , Ruofeng Tong

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in modeling sequential data, including event sequences, temporal point processes, and irregular time series. Recently, transformers have largely replaced recurrent networks in these tasks.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Ivan Karpukhin , Andrey Savchenko

The versatility of self-attention mechanism earned transformers great success in almost all data modalities, with limitations on the quadratic complexity and difficulty of training. Efficient transformers, on the other hand, often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Minh Lenhat , Viet Anh Nguyen , Khoa Nguyen , Duong Duc Hieu , Dao Huu Hung , Truong Son Hy

The attention mechanism in its standard implementation contains extraneous rotational degrees of freedom that are carried through computation but do not affect model activations or outputs. We introduce a simple symmetry-breaking protocol…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Eva Silverstein , Daniel Kunin , Vasudev Shyam

A persistent paradox in time-series forecasting is that structurally simple MLP and linear models often outperform high-capacity Transformers. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch in the sequence-modeling primitive: while many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Jevon Twitty , Vinh Pham , Nitiwith Rotchanarak , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Shihao Yang , Jiecheng Lu

Despite their ubiquity in core AI fields like natural language processing, the mechanics of deep attention-based neural networks like the Transformer model are not fully understood. In this article, we present a new perspective towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Matthew A. Wright , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Remarkable achievements have been attained by deep neural networks in various applications. However, the increasing depth and width of such models also lead to explosive growth in both storage and computation, which has restricted the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Linfeng Zhang , Zhanhong Tan , Jiebo Song , Jingwei Chen , Chenglong Bao , Kaisheng Ma

We consider two biologically plausible structures, the Spiking Neural Network (SNN) and the self-attention mechanism. The former offers an energy-efficient and event-driven paradigm for deep learning, while the latter has the ability to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Zhaokun Zhou , Yuesheng Zhu , Chao He , Yaowei Wang , Shuicheng Yan , Yonghong Tian , Li Yuan

Depth completion aims to predict dense depth maps with sparse depth measurements from a depth sensor. Currently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models are the most popular methods applied to depth completion tasks. However,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Jian Qian , Miao Sun , Ashley Lee , Jie Li , Shenglong Zhuo , Patrick Yin Chiang

Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Michael E. Sander , Pierre Ablin , Mathieu Blondel , Gabriel Peyré

In Transformer architectures, tokens\textemdash discrete units derived from raw data\textemdash are formed by segmenting inputs into fixed-length chunks. Each token is then mapped to an embedding, enabling parallel attention computations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenglun Kong , Yize Li , Fanhu Zeng , Lei Xin , Shvat Messica , Xue Lin , Pu Zhao , Manolis Kellis , Hao Tang , Marinka Zitnik

In recent years, numerous Transformer-based models have been applied to long-term time-series forecasting (LTSF) tasks. However, recent studies with linear models have questioned their effectiveness, demonstrating that simple linear layers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Jiaheng Yin , Zhengxin Shi , Jianshen Zhang , Xiaomin Lin , Yulin Huang , Yongzhi Qi , Wei Qi

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yuandong Tian , Yiping Wang , Beidi Chen , Simon Du

Attention layers are the core component of transformers, the current state-of-the-art neural network architecture. Alternatives to softmax-based attention are being explored due to its tendency to hinder effective information flow. Even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Thiziri Nait Saada , Alireza Naderi , Jared Tanner

Transformers have recently shown superior performances on various vision tasks. The large, sometimes even global, receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power over their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Zhuofan Xia , Xuran Pan , Shiji Song , Li Erran Li , Gao Huang

Attention sinks and massive activations are recurring and closely related phenomena in Transformer models. Existing explanations have largely focused on the forward pass, yet in pre-norm Transformers, large residual-stream norms play only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Yihong Chen , Zhouchen Lin , Quanming Yao

Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Xiaoxuan Yang , Peilin Chen , Tergel Molom-Ochir , Yiran Chen