Related papers: Provably learning a multi-head attention layer
Attention-based transformers have been remarkably successful at modeling generative processes across various domains and modalities. In this paper, we study the behavior of transformers on data drawn from \kth Markov processes, where the…
The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…
Attention based Transformer architecture has enabled significant advances in the field of natural language processing. In addition to new pre-training techniques, recent improvements crucially rely on working with a relatively larger…
The Transformer is an extremely powerful and prominent deep learning architecture. In this work, we challenge the commonly held belief in deep learning that going deeper is better, and show an alternative design approach that is building…
Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we…
In this work, we study how multi-head latent attention (MLA), a popular strategy for compressing key/value memory, affects a transformer's internal capacity during pretraining. Using a lightweight suite of Marchenko-Pastur (MP) diagnostics,…
Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in…
The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in popular transformer architectures poses significant challenges for training and inference, and becomes the bottleneck for long inputs. Is it possible to significantly reduce…
Deep learning employs multi-layer neural networks trained via the backpropagation algorithm. This approach has achieved success across many domains and relies on adaptive gradient methods such as the Adam optimizer. Sequence modeling…
Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…
Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
When and how can an attention mechanism learn to selectively attend to informative tokens, thereby enabling detection of weak, rare, and sparsely located features? We address these questions theoretically in a sparse-token classification…
Neural attention has become central to many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing and related domains. Attention networks are an easy-to-train and effective method for softly simulating alignment; however, the approach does…
Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…
Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly…
Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…
As the demand for processing extended textual data grows, the ability to handle long-range dependencies and maintain computational efficiency is more critical than ever. One of the key issues for long-sequence modeling using attention-based…
Transformer layers, which use an alternating pattern of multi-head attention and multi-layer perceptron (MLP) layers, provide an effective tool for a variety of machine learning problems. As the transformer layers use residual connections…
Despite the popularity of the Transformer architecture, the standard algorithm for computing Attention suffers from quadratic time complexity in context length $n$. Alman and Song [NeurIPS 2023] showed that when the head dimension $d =…