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Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Hongyu Hè , Marko Kabic

The ability to perform arithmetic tasks is a remarkable trait of human intelligence and might form a critical component of more complex reasoning tasks. In this work, we investigate if the surface form of a number has any influence on how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Rodrigo Nogueira , Zhiying Jiang , Jimmy Lin

While scaling Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated promising performance across various tasks, it also introduces redundant architectures, posing efficiency challenges for real-world deployment. Despite some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Shwai He , Guoheng Sun , Zheyu Shen , Ang Li

In both Computer Vision and the wider Deep Learning field, the Transformer architecture is well-established as state-of-the-art for many applications. For Multitask Learning, however, where there may be many more queries necessary compared…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Christian Bohn , Thomas Kurbiel , Klaus Friedrichs , Hasan Tercan , Tobias Meisen

Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Annette Rios , Chantal Amrhein , Noëmi Aepli , Rico Sennrich

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 are widely used in natural language processing, where they consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance. This is mainly due to their attention-based architecture, which allows them to model rich linguistic relations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Nikolaos Mylonas , Ioannis Mollas , Grigorios Tsoumakas

Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Mehryar Mohri

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

The standard neural machine translation model can only decode with the same depth configuration as training. Restricted by this feature, we have to deploy models of various sizes to maintain the same translation latency, because the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-19 Qiang Wang , Tong Xiao , Jingbo Zhu

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Prateek Verma , Mert Pilanci

Despite the popularity of transformers in practice, their architectures are empirically designed and neither mathematically justified nor interpretable. Moreover, as indicated by many empirical studies, some components of transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Peng Wang , Yifu Lu , Yaodong Yu , Druv Pai , Qing Qu , Yi Ma

The state of the art in learning meaningful semantic representations of words is the Transformer model and its attention mechanisms. Simply put, the attention mechanisms learn to attend to specific parts of the input dispensing recurrence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Dongsheng Wang , Casper Hansen , Lucas Chaves Lima , Christian Hansen , Maria Maistro , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Christina Lioma

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh

Algorithmic reasoning requires capabilities which are most naturally understood through recurrent models of computation, like the Turing machine. However, Transformer models, while lacking recurrence, are able to perform such reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Bingbin Liu , Jordan T. Ash , Surbhi Goel , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Cyril Zhang

We investigate multi-scale transformer language models that learn representations of text at multiple scales, and present three different architectures that have an inductive bias to handle the hierarchical nature of language. Experiments…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-05 Sandeep Subramanian , Ronan Collobert , Marc'Aurelio Ranzato , Y-Lan Boureau

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan

Depth-adaptive neural networks can dynamically adjust depths according to the hardness of input words, and thus improve efficiency. The main challenge is how to measure such hardness and decide the required depths (i.e., layers) to conduct.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Yijin Liu , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Yufeng Chen , Jinan Xu