Related papers: Higher-Order Transformer Derivative Estimates for …
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…
This paper introduces a high-order Markov chain task to investigate how transformers learn to integrate information from multiple past positions with varying statistical significance. We demonstrate that transformers learn this task…
Transformers are state-of-the-art in a wide range of NLP tasks and have also been applied to many real-world products. Understanding the reliability and certainty of transformer model predictions is crucial for building trustable machine…
Previous research has explored the computational expressivity of Transformer models in simulating Boolean circuits or Turing machines. However, the learnability of these simulators from observational data has remained an open question. Our…
Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…
We explore the expressive power of Transformers by establishing precise approximation error upper and lower bounds for H\"{o}lder class. Specifically, a new approximation upper bound is derived for the standard Transformer architecture…
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 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…
Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…
In mechanistic interpretability, recent work scrutinizes transformer "circuits" - sparse, mono or multi layer sub computations, that may reflect human understandable functions. Yet, these network circuits are rarely acid-tested for their…
Attention-based transformers have been remarkably successful at modeling generative processes across various domains and modalities. In this paper, we study the behavior of transformers on data drawn from \kth Markov processes, where the…
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…
Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…
In the classical transformer attention scheme, we are given three $n \times d$ size matrices $Q, K, V$ (the query, key, and value tokens), and the goal is to compute a new $n \times d$ size matrix $D^{-1} \exp(QK^\top) V$ where $D =…
Transformer training is notoriously difficult, requiring a careful design of optimizers and use of various heuristics. We make progress towards understanding the subtleties of training Transformers by carefully studying a simple yet…
Effective hyper-parameter tuning is essential to guarantee the performance that neural networks have come to be known for. In this work, a principled approach to choosing the learning rate is proposed for shallow feedforward neural…
Transformers have become the dominant architecture in modern machine learning, yet the theoretical understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. This paper develops a rigorous mathematical framework for analyzing gradient-based…
Weighted finite-state machines are a fundamental building block of NLP systems. They have withstood the test of time -- from their early use in noisy channel models in the 1990s up to modern-day neurally parameterized conditional random…
In this paper we provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first comprehensive approach for incorporating various masking mechanisms into Transformers architectures in a scalable way. We show that recent results on linear causal attention…
We investigate the in-context learning capabilities of transformers for the $d$-dimensional mixture of linear regression model, providing theoretical insights into their existence, generalization bounds, and training dynamics. Specifically,…