Related papers: The Power of Hard Attention Transformers on Data S…
We contribute to the study of formal languages that can be recognized by transformer encoders. We focus on two self-attention mechanisms: (1) UHAT (Unique Hard Attention Transformers) and (2) AHAT (Average Hard Attention Transformers). UHAT…
This paper analyzes three formal models of Transformer encoders that differ in the form of their self-attention mechanism: unique hard attention (UHAT); generalized unique hard attention (GUHAT), which generalizes UHAT; and averaging hard…
This note is a survey of various results on the capabilities of unique hard attention transformers encoders (UHATs) to recognize formal languages. We distinguish between masked vs. non-masked, finite vs. infinite image and general vs.…
Transformers have emerged as a widely used neural network model for various natural language processing tasks. Previous research explored their relationship with constant-depth threshold circuits, making two assumptions: average-hard…
The expressive power of transformers over inputs of unbounded size can be studied through their ability to recognize classes of formal languages. In this paper, we establish exact characterizations of transformers with hard attention (in…
Transformers are emerging as the new workhorse of NLP, showing great success across tasks. Unlike LSTMs, transformers process input sequences entirely through self-attention. Previous work has suggested that the computational capabilities…
Transformer models have advanced the state of the art in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present a new Transformer architecture, Extended Transformer Construction (ETC), that addresses two key challenges of…
Previous work on the learnability of transformers \textemdash\ focused primarily on examining their ability to approximate specific algorithmic patterns through training \textemdash\ has largely been data-driven, offering only probabilistic…
Transformers flexibly operate over sets of real-valued vectors representing task-specific entities and their attributes, where each vector might encode one word-piece token and its position in a sequence, or some piece of information that…
Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice. We bridge this gap by analyzing standard…
We study conditions under which transformers using soft attention can simulate hard attention, that is, effectively focus all attention on a subset of positions. First, we examine several subclasses of languages recognized by hard-attention…
To capture user preference, transformer models have been widely applied to model sequential user behavior data. The core of transformer architecture lies in the self-attention mechanism, which computes the pairwise attention scores in a…
Transformers have become a standard neural network architecture for many NLP problems, motivating theoretical analysis of their power in terms of formal languages. Recent work has shown that transformers with hard attention are quite…
We analyse the computational power of transformer encoders as sequence-to-sequence functions on vectors. We show that average hard attention can be used to simulate arithmetic circuits if they are given as an input to an encoder. The…
Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer…
Transformer networks have seen great success in natural language processing and machine vision, where task objectives such as next word prediction and image classification benefit from nuanced context sensitivity across high-dimensional…
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…
Understanding the expressive power of transformers has recently attracted attention, as it offers insights into their abilities and limitations. Many studies analyze unique hard attention transformers, where attention selects a single…
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…
The capabilities of transformer networks such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) have captured the world's attention. The crucial computational mechanism underlying their performance relies on transforming a complete input…