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Related papers: Provably learning a multi-head attention layer

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While Transformer self-attention offers strong parallelism, the Key-Value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and becomes a bottleneck for inference efficiency. Multi-head latent attention was recently developed to compress the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Keqi Deng , Philip C. Woodland

Attention mechanism is a central component of the transformer architecture which led to the phenomenal success of large language models. However, the theoretical principles underlying the attention mechanism are poorly understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Xuechen Zhang , Samet Oymak

We find that correct-to-incorrect sycophancy signals are most linearly separable within multi-head attention activations. Motivated by the linear representation hypothesis, we train linear probes across the residual stream, multilayer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Rifo Genadi , Munachiso Nwadike , Nurdaulet Mukhituly , Hilal Alquabeh , Tatsuya Hiraoka , Kentaro Inui

It is known that a deep neural network model pre-trained with large-scale data greatly improves the accuracy of various tasks, especially when there are resource constraints. However, the information needed to solve a given task can vary,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Masahiro Kaneko , Mamoru Komachi

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

This paper introduces a high-order Markov chain task to investigate how transformers learn to integrate information from multiple past positions with varying statistical significance. We demonstrate that transformers learn this task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Oğuz Kaan Yüksel , Rodrigo Alvarez Lucendo , Nicolas Flammarion

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

We propose a novel attention model that can accurately attends to target objects of various scales and shapes in images. The model is trained to gradually suppress irrelevant regions in an input image via a progressive attentive process…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-08-08 Paul Hongsuck Seo , Zhe Lin , Scott Cohen , Xiaohui Shen , Bohyung Han

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Qingru Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Sheng Zha , Tuo Zhao

Attention mechanisms, especially self-attention, have played an increasingly important role in deep feature representation for visual tasks. Self-attention updates the feature at each position by computing a weighted sum of features using…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Meng-Hao Guo , Zheng-Ning Liu , Tai-Jiang Mu , Shi-Min Hu

As an important part of speech recognition technology, automatic speech keyword recognition has been intensively studied in recent years. Such technology becomes especially pivotal under situations with limited infrastructures and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Ruisen Luo , Tianran Sun , Chen Wang , Miao Du , Zuodong Tang , Kai Zhou , Xiaofeng Gong , Xiaomei Yang

Linear attention reduces the quadratic cost of softmax attention to $\mathcal{O}(T)$, but its memory state grows as $\mathcal{O}(T)$ in Frobenius norm, causing progressive interference between stored associations. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Vishal Pandey , Gopal Singh

Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Zhuo Li , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Xiangtai Li , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

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

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Zhen Cheng , Hao-Bo Yang , Wan-Yi Huang , Jin-Long Li

Deep neural networks are composed of layers of parametrised linear operations intertwined with non linear activations. In basic models, such as the multi-layer perceptron, a linear layer operates on a simple input vector embedding of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Jean-Marc Andreoli

Irregular sampling occurs in many time series modeling applications where it presents a significant challenge to standard deep learning models. This work is motivated by the analysis of physiological time series data in electronic health…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Satya Narayan Shukla , Benjamin M. Marlin

Reasoning about graphs evolving over time is a challenging concept in many domains, such as bioinformatics, physics, and social networks. We consider a common case in which edges can be short term interactions (e.g., messaging) or long term…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-22 Boris Knyazev , Carolyn Augusta , Graham W. Taylor

Transformer-based language models excel at both recall (retrieving memorized facts) and reasoning (performing multi-step inference), but whether these abilities rely on distinct internal mechanisms remains unclear. Distinguishing recall…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Harshwardhan Fartale , Ashish Kattamuri , Rahul Raja , Arpita Vats , Ishita Prasad , Akshata Kishore Moharir