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The capacity of neural networks like the widely adopted transformer is known to be very high. Evidence is emerging that they learn successfully due to inductive bias in the training routine, typically a variant of gradient descent (GD). To…
Attention-based transformers have achieved tremendous success across a variety of disciplines including natural languages. To deepen our understanding of their sequential modeling capabilities, there is a growing interest in using Markov…
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…
Transformers serve as the foundational architecture for large language and video generation models, such as GPT, BERT, SORA and their successors. Empirical studies have demonstrated that real-world data and learning tasks exhibit…
Transformers empirically perform precise probabilistic reasoning in carefully constructed ``Bayesian wind tunnels'' and in large-scale language models, yet the mechanisms by which gradient-based learning creates the required internal…
The multi-head attention layer is one of the key components of the transformer architecture that sets it apart from traditional feed-forward models. Given a sequence length $k$, attention matrices…
Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…
Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…
Transformers have achieved great success across a wide range of applications, yet the theoretical foundations underlying their success remain largely unexplored. To demystify the strong capacities of transformers applied to versatile…
Transformer-based neural network architectures achieve state-of-the-art results in different domains, from natural language processing (NLP) to computer vision (CV). The key idea of Transformers, the attention mechanism, has already led to…
Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a…
Attention scores in transformers are bilinear forms $S_{ij} = x_i^\top M x_j / \sqrt{d_h}$ whose maximum magnitude governs overflow risk in low-precision training. We derive a \emph{rank-aware concentration inequality}: when the interaction…
We present a generalization of Transformers to any-order permutation invariant data (sets, graphs, and hypergraphs). We begin by observing that Transformers generalize DeepSets, or first-order (set-input) permutation invariant MLPs. Then,…
We propose a probabilistic interpretation of exponential dot product attention of transformers and contrastive learning based off of exponential families. The attention sublayer of transformers is equivalent to a gradient ascent step of the…
While current state-of-the-art NMT models, such as RNN seq2seq and Transformers, possess a large number of parameters, they are still shallow in comparison to convolutional models used for both text and vision applications. In this work we…
We study the problem of learning Transformer-based sequence models with black-box access to their outputs. In this setting, a learner may adaptively query the oracle with any sequence of vectors and observe the output of the target…
Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and…
Neural networks are often highly sensitive to input and weight perturbations. This sensitivity has been linked to pathologies such as vulnerability to adversarial examples, divergent training, and overfitting. To combat these problems, past…
Despite their central role in the success of foundational models and large-scale language modeling, the theoretical foundations governing the operation of Transformers remain only partially understood. Contemporary research has largely…
Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…