Related papers: Transformers Learn Low Sensitivity Functions: Inve…
Following the surge of popularity of Transformers in Computer Vision, several studies have attempted to determine whether they could be more robust to distribution shifts and provide better uncertainty estimates than Convolutional Neural…
Pretrained transformer-based Language Models (LMs) are well-known for their ability to achieve significant improvement on NLP tasks, but their black-box nature, which leads to a lack of interpretability, has been a major concern. My…
Transformer-based language models (LMs) are at the core of modern NLP, but their internal prediction construction process is opaque and largely not understood. In this work, we make a substantial step towards unveiling this underlying…
We study the error rate of LLMs on tasks like arithmetic that require a deterministic output, and repetitive processing of tokens drawn from a small set of alternatives. We argue that incorrect predictions arise when small errors in the…
Recently, vision transformers and MLP-based models have been developed in order to address some of the prevalent weaknesses in convolutional neural networks. Due to the novelty of transformers being used in this domain along with the…
We study how information propagates in decoder-only Transformers, which are the architectural backbone of most existing frontier large language models (LLMs). We rely on a theoretical signal propagation analysis -- specifically, we analyse…
Designed to learn long-range interactions on sequential data, transformers continue to show state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of tasks. In contrast to CNNs, they contain no inductive bias that prioritizes local interactions. This…
Transformers have achieved extraordinary success in modern machine learning due to their excellent ability to handle sequential data, especially in next-token prediction (NTP) tasks. However, the theoretical understanding of their…
We establish connections between the Transformer architecture, originally introduced for natural language processing, and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning on graphs. We show how Transformers can be viewed as message…
Transformer-based models are now predominant in NLP. They outperform approaches based on static models in many respects. This success has in turn prompted research that reveals a number of biases in the language models generated by…
This paper reveals a novel linear characteristic exclusive to transformer decoders, including models such as GPT, LLaMA, OPT, BLOOM and others. We analyze embedding transformations between sequential layers, uncovering a near-perfect linear…
Large Language Models (LLMs), powered by Transformers, have demonstrated human-like intelligence capabilities, yet their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework for interpreting LLMs as…
In order to understand the in-context learning phenomenon, recent works have adopted a stylized experimental framework and demonstrated that Transformers can learn gradient-based learning algorithms for various classes of real-valued…
Existing work has analyzed the representational capacity of the transformer architecture by means of formal models of computation. However, the focus so far has been on analyzing the architecture in terms of language \emph{acceptance}. We…
Modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are known to be sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease when applied to real-world, noisy data. However, it is still unclear why models are less robust to some…
Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…
Transformers excel through content-addressable retrieval and the ability to exploit contexts of, in principle, unbounded length. We recast associative memory at the level of probability measures, treating a context as a distribution over…
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…
Much theoretical work has described the ability of transformers to represent formal languages. However, linking theoretical results to empirical performance is not straightforward due to the complex interplay between the architecture, the…
In the last few years, the ML community has created a number of new NLP models based on transformer architecture. These models have shown great performance for various NLP tasks on benchmark datasets, often surpassing SOTA results. Buoyed…