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Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Self-attention in Transformers relies on globally normalized softmax weights, causing all tokens to compete for influence at every layer. When composed across depth, this interaction pattern induces strong synchronization dynamics that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingkun Liu , Yisong Yue , Max Welling , Yue Song

Attention layers -- which map a sequence of inputs to a sequence of outputs -- are core building blocks of the Transformer architecture which has achieved significant breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Hengyu Fu , Tianyu Guo , Yu Bai , Song Mei

Attention and self-attention mechanisms, are now central to state-of-the-art deep learning on sequential tasks. However, most recent progress hinges on heuristic approaches with limited understanding of attention's role in model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Giancarlo Kerg , Bhargav Kanuparthi , Anirudh Goyal , Kyle Goyette , Yoshua Bengio , Guillaume Lajoie

Attention mechanisms have raised significant interest in the research community, since they promise significant improvements in the performance of neural network architectures. However, in any specific problem, we still lack a principled…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Rafael Pedro , Arlindo L. Oliveira

User interests are usually dynamic in the real world, which poses both theoretical and practical challenges for learning accurate preferences from rich behavior data. Among existing user behavior modeling solutions, attention networks are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Chao Chen , Haoyu Geng , Nianzu Yang , Junchi Yan , Daiyue Xue , Jianping Yu , Xiaokang Yang

Sequential self-attention models usually rely on additive positional embeddings, which inject positional information into item representations at the input. In the absence of positional signals, the attention block is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Timur Nabiev , Evgeny Frolov

Inference on large language models (LLMs) can be expensive in terms of the compute and memory costs involved, especially when long sequence lengths are used. In particular, the self-attention mechanism used in LLM inference contributes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Prajwal Singhania , Siddharth Singh , Shwai He , Soheil Feizi , Abhinav Bhatele

Self-attention is a method of encoding sequences of vectors by relating these vectors to each-other based on pairwise similarities. These models have recently shown promising results for modeling discrete sequences, but they are non-trivial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-19 Matthias Sperber , Jan Niehues , Graham Neubig , Sebastian Stüker , Alex Waibel

Transformer-based self-attention mechanism serves as the core of modern language models, yet it often suffers from localization, where attentions collapse onto a limited subset of tokens and fail to capture long-range dependencies. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Nakyung Lee , Yeongoon Kim , Minhae Oh , Suhwan Kim , Jin Woo Koo , Hyewon Jo , Jungwoo Lee

Large language models (LLMs) represent a groundbreaking advancement in the domain of natural language processing due to their impressive reasoning abilities. Recently, there has been considerable interest in increasing the context lengths…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Utkarsh Saxena , Gobinda Saha , Sakshi Choudhary , Kaushik Roy

Recent work on Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has revealed striking limits in their working memory capacity, similar to what has been found in human behavioral studies. Specifically, these models' performance drops…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Dongyu Gong , Hantao Zhang

Language Models (LMs) assign significant attention to the first token, even if it is not semantically important, which is known as attention sink. This phenomenon has been widely adopted in applications such as streaming/long context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Xiangming Gu , Tianyu Pang , Chao Du , Qian Liu , Fengzhuo Zhang , Cunxiao Du , Ye Wang , Min Lin

The behavior of the network and its stability are governed by both dynamics of individual nodes as well as their topological interconnections. Attention mechanism as an integral part of neural network models was initially designed for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Nooshin Bahador , Milad Lankarany

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit two striking and ostensibly unrelated behaviours: in-context learning (ICL) and repetitive generation. In both, the model behaves as though it had summarised the context into a population-level statistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Haoren Xu , Guanhua Fang

Sequential modelling with self-attention has achieved cutting edge performances in natural language processing. With advantages in model flexibility, computation complexity and interpretability, self-attention is gradually becoming a key…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-02 Da Xu , Chuanwei Ruan , Sushant Kumar , Evren Korpeoglu , Kannan Achan

Sentiment Analysis has seen much progress in the past two decades. For the past few years, neural network approaches, primarily RNNs and CNNs, have been the most successful for this task. Recently, a new category of neural networks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-20 Artaches Ambartsoumian , Fred Popowich

Despite the prevalence of the attention sink phenomenon in Large Language Models (LLMs), where initial tokens disproportionately monopolize attention scores, its structural origins remain elusive. This work provides a \textit{mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Siquan Li , Kaiqi Jiang , Jiacheng Sun , Tianyang Hu

Attention mechanism is contributing to the majority of recent advances in machine learning for natural language processing. Additionally, it results in an attention map that shows the proportional influence of each input in its decision.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Duc Hau Nguyen , Cyrielle Mallart , Guillaume Gravier , Pascale Sébillot

Attention-based mechanisms are widely used in machine learning, most prominently in transformers. However, hyperparameters such as the rank of the attention matrices and the number of heads are scaled nearly the same way in all realizations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Noah Amsel , Gilad Yehudai , Joan Bruna