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Multilayer transformer networks consist of interleaved self-attention and feedforward sublayers. Could ordering the sublayers in a different pattern lead to better performance? We generate randomly ordered transformers and train them with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-24 Ofir Press , Noah A. Smith , Omer Levy

We study the approximation capabilities, convergence speeds and on-convergence behaviors of transformers trained on in-context recall tasks -- which requires to recognize the \emph{positional} association between a pair of tokens from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Quan Nguyen , Thanh Nguyen-Tang

Transformers have achieved significant success across various domains, relying on self-attention to capture dependencies. However, the standard first-order attention mechanism is often limited by a low-rank bottleneck, struggling to capture…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hanting Chen , Chong Zhu , Kai Han , Yuchuan Tian , Yuchen Liang , Tianyu Guo , Xinghao Chen , Dacheng Tao , Yunhe Wang

The Transformer is a highly successful deep learning model that has revolutionised the world of artificial neural networks, first in natural language processing and later in computer vision. This model is based on the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Ughi , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Matteucci

In-context learning refers to the ability of a model to condition on a prompt sequence consisting of in-context examples (input-output pairs corresponding to some task) along with a new query input, and generate the corresponding output.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Shivam Garg , Dimitris Tsipras , Percy Liang , Gregory Valiant

While large language models based on the transformer architecture have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities, understandings of such capabilities are still in an early stage, where existing theory and mechanistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Tianyu Guo , Wei Hu , Song Mei , Huan Wang , Caiming Xiong , Silvio Savarese , Yu Bai

Large transformer models pretrained on offline reinforcement learning datasets have demonstrated remarkable in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) capabilities, where they can make good decisions when prompted with interaction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Licong Lin , Yu Bai , Song Mei

Transformers demonstrate significant advantages as the building block of modern LLMs. In this work, we study the capacities of Transformers in performing unsupervised learning. We show that multi-layered Transformers, given a sufficiently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-14 Yihan He , Yuan Cao , Hong-Yu Chen , Dennis Wu , Jianqing Fan , Han Liu

An intriguing property of the Transformer is its ability to perform in-context learning (ICL), where the Transformer can solve different inference tasks without parameter updating based on the contextual information provided by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Renpu Liu , Ruida Zhou , Cong Shen , Jing Yang

Transformers have become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling tasks such as natural language processing or audio processing, and they are now even considered for tasks that are not naturally sequential such as image…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Jorg Bornschein , Yazhe Li , Amal Rannen-Triki

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Esmail Gumaan

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

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…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins

Transformers have achieved great success in recent years. Interestingly, transformers have shown particularly strong in-context learning capability -- even without fine-tuning, they are still able to solve unseen tasks well purely based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Zihao Li , Yuan Cao , Cheng Gao , Yihan He , Han Liu , Jason M. Klusowski , Jianqing Fan , Mengdi Wang

Large Transformer models routinely achieve state-of-the-art results on a number of tasks but training these models can be prohibitively costly, especially on long sequences. We introduce two techniques to improve the efficiency of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 Nikita Kitaev , Łukasz Kaiser , Anselm Levskaya

Many neural network architectures are known to be Turing Complete, and can thus, in principle implement arbitrary algorithms. However, Transformers are unique in that they can implement gradient-based learning algorithms under simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Xiang Cheng , Yuxin Chen , Suvrit Sra

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Zizheng Pan , Bohan Zhuang , Haoyu He , Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai

In-context learning, a capability that enables a model to learn from input examples on the fly without necessitating weight updates, is a defining characteristic of large language models. In this work, we follow the setting proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-29 Kartik Ahuja , David Lopez-Paz