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Attention-based Transformers have demonstrated strong adaptability across a wide range of tasks and have become the backbone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their underlying mechanisms remain open for further exploration.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ruifeng Ren , Sheng Ouyang , Huayi Tang , Yong Liu

This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hemanth Saratchandran , Jianqiao Zheng , Yiping Ji , Wenbo Zhang , Simon Lucey

We propose a graph-oriented attention-based explainability method for tabular data. Tasks involving tabular data have been solved mostly using traditional tree-based machine learning models which have the challenges of feature selection and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Andrea Treviño Gavito , Diego Klabjan , Jean Utke

In the current landscape of large models, the Transformer stands as a cornerstone, playing a pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of modern models. However, its application encounters challenges attributed to the substantial computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-03 Gaoxiang Duan , Junkai Zhang , Xiaoying Zheng , Yongxin Zhu , Victor Chang

Flow-based generative models have shown an excellent ability to explicitly learn the probability density function of data via a sequence of invertible transformations. Yet, learning attentions in generative flows remains understudied, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Rhea Sanjay Sukthanker , Zhiwu Huang , Suryansh Kumar , Radu Timofte , Luc Van Gool

Temporal causal analysis means understanding the underlying causes behind observed variables over time. Deep learning based methods such as transformers are increasingly used to capture temporal dynamics and causal relationships beyond mere…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Riya Mahesh , Rahul Vashisht , Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan

Transformers have achieved widespread and remarkable success, while the computational complexity of their attention modules remains a major bottleneck for vision tasks. Existing methods mainly employ 8-bit or 4-bit quantization to balance…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Chaodong Xiao , Zhengqiang Zhang , Lei Zhang

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Dayiheng Liu , Rong Xiao , Derek F. Wong , Haibo Zhang , Boxing Chen , Lidia S. Chao

While attention has been empirically shown to improve model performance, it lacks a rigorous mathematical justification. This short paper establishes a novel connection between attention mechanisms and multinomial regression. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr

Transformers have demonstrated outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks, owing to their self-attention mechanism, but they are highly energy-consuming. Spiking Neural Networks have emerged as a promising energy-efficient…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Yufei Guo , Xiaode Liu , Yuanpei Chen , Weihang Peng , Yuhan Zhang , Zhe Ma

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

Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to Large Language Models. In generative Transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, GPU-stored…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Nathan Leroux , Paul-Philipp Manea , Chirag Sudarshan , Jan Finkbeiner , Sebastian Siegel , John Paul Strachan , Emre Neftci

Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaojie Xia , Huigang Zhang , Chaoliang Zhong , Jun Sun , Yusuke Oishi

While Transformers have revolutionized deep learning, their quadratic attention complexity hinders their ability to process infinitely long inputs. We propose Feedback Attention Memory (FAM), a novel Transformer architecture that leverages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Dongseong Hwang , Weiran Wang , Zhuoyuan Huo , Khe Chai Sim , Pedro Moreno Mengibar

The transformer's attention mechanism has revolutionized AI and machine learning, with its efficient computation being crucial to its performance. However, calculating attention involves matrix operations interspersed with softmax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Kosmas Alexandridis , Vasileios Titopoulos , Giorgos Dimitrakopoulos

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

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

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang