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Transformers are widely used for their ability to capture data relations in sequence processing, with great success for a wide range of static tasks. However, the computational and memory footprint of their main component, i.e., the Scaled…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Ginés Carreto Picón , Illia Oleksiienko , Lukas Hedegaard , Arian Bakhtiarnia , Alexandros Iosifidis

Attention mechanisms have recently boosted performance on a range of NLP tasks. Because attention layers explicitly weight input components' representations, it is also often assumed that attention can be used to identify information that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-11 Sofia Serrano , Noah A. Smith

Multi-head attention is a driving force behind state-of-the-art transformers, which achieve remarkable performance across a variety of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision tasks. It has been observed that for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Tam Nguyen , Tan M. Nguyen , Dung D. Le , Duy Khuong Nguyen , Viet-Anh Tran , Richard G. Baraniuk , Nhat Ho , Stanley J. Osher

Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

Self-attention, as the key block of transformers, is a powerful mechanism for extracting features from the inputs. In essence, what self-attention does is to infer the pairwise relations between the elements of the inputs, and modify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Lemeng Wu , Xingchao Liu , Qiang Liu

Transformers have proven highly effective across modalities, but standard softmax attention scales quadratically with sequence length, limiting long context modeling. Linear attention mitigates this by approximating attention with kernel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ashkan Shahbazi , Chayne Thrash , Yikun Bai , Keaton Hamm , Navid NaderiAlizadeh , Soheil Kolouri

In natural language processing (NLP), the context of a word or sentence plays an essential role. Contextual information such as the semantic representation of a passage or historical dialogue forms an essential part of a conversation and a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Rui Yu , Yifeng Li , Wenpeng Lu , Longbing Cao

Attending to what is relevant is fundamental to both the mammalian brain and modern machine learning models such as Transformers. Yet, determining relevance remains a core challenge, traditionally offloaded to learning algorithms like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Ahsan Adeel

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Juho Lee , Yoonho Lee , Jungtaek Kim , Adam R. Kosiorek , Seungjin Choi , Yee Whye Teh

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

The attention mechanism lies at the core of the transformer architecture, providing an interpretable model-internal signal that has motivated a growing interest in attention-based model explanations. Although attention weights do not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Marte Eggen , Jacob Lysnæs-Larsen , Inga Strümke

Transformers have been successfully used in various fields and are becoming the standard tools in computer vision. However, self-attention, a core component of transformers, has a quadratic complexity problem, which limits the use of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Jiuk Hong , Chaehyeon Lee , Soyoun Bang , Heechul Jung

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

The neural attention mechanism has been incorporated into deep neural networks to achieve state-of-the-art performance in various domains. Most such models use multi-head self-attention which is appealing for the ability to attend to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Shujian Zhang , Xinjie Fan , Huangjie Zheng , Korawat Tanwisuth , Mingyuan Zhou

Pretrained language models based on the transformer architecture have shown great success in NLP. Textual training data often comes from the web and is thus tagged with time-specific information, but most language models ignore this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-05 Guy D. Rosin , Kira Radinsky

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Sequence-to-sequence (encoder-decoder) models with attention constitute a cornerstone of deep learning research, as they have enabled unprecedented sequential data modeling capabilities. This effectiveness largely stems from the capacity of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Aristotelis Charalampous , Sotirios Chatzis

The attention mechanism has been widely used in deep neural networks as a model component. By now, it has become a critical building block in many state-of-the-art natural language models. Despite its great success established empirically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Haoye Lu , Yongyi Mao , Amiya Nayak

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen