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Since their introduction the Trasformer architectures emerged as the dominating architectures for both natural language processing and, more recently, computer vision applications. An intrinsic limitation of this family of "fully-attentive"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Carmelo Scribano , Giorgia Franchini , Marco Prato , Marko Bertogna

Self-attention is key to the remarkable success of transformers in sequence modeling tasks including many applications in natural language processing and computer vision. Like neural network layers, these attention mechanisms are often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Tan M. Nguyen , Tam Nguyen , Nhat Ho , Andrea L. Bertozzi , Richard G. Baraniuk , Stanley J. Osher

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Lorenzo Basile , Valentino Maiorca , Diego Doimo , Francesco Locatello , Alberto Cazzaniga

\textit{Attention} computes the dependency between representations, and it encourages the model to focus on the important selective features. Attention-based models, such as Transformer and graph attention network (GAT), are widely utilized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Kyungwoo Song , Yohan Jung , Dongjun Kim , Il-Chul Moon

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Venmugil Elango

Modeling of longitudinal cohort data typically involves complex temporal dependencies between multiple variables. There, the transformer architecture, which has been highly successful in language and vision applications, allows us to…

The self-attention mechanism, at the heart of the Transformer model, is able to effectively model pairwise interactions between tokens. However, numerous recent works have shown that it is unable to perform basic tasks involving detecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sayak Chakrabarti , Toniann Pitassi , Josh Alman

Vision Transformers are very popular nowadays due to their state-of-the-art performance in several computer vision tasks, such as image classification and action recognition. Although their performance has been greatly enhanced through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Dimitrios Konstantinidis , Ilias Papastratis , Kosmas Dimitropoulos , Petros Daras

Transformer-based language models display impressive reasoning-like behavior, yet remain brittle on tasks that require stable symbolic manipulation. This paper develops a unified perspective on these phenomena by interpreting self-attention…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar

This work proposes an extensive analysis of the Transformer architecture in the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) setting. Focusing on the encoder-decoder attention mechanism, we prove that attention weights systematically make alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Javier Ferrando , Marta R. Costa-jussà

The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Jesse Vig , Yonatan Belinkov

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Transformers excel at time series modelling through attention mechanisms that capture long-term temporal patterns. However, they assume uniform time intervals and therefore struggle with irregular time series. Neural Ordinary Differential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Yashas Shende , Aritra Das , Reva Laxmi Chauhan , Arghya Pathak , Debayan Gupta

Attention regulates information transfer between tokens. For this, query and key vectors are compared, typically in terms of a scalar product, $\mathbf{Q}^T\mathbf{K}$, together with a subsequent softmax normalization. In geometric terms,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Claudius Gros

The attention mechanism forms the foundational blocks for transformer language models. Recent approaches show that scaling the model achieves human-level performance. However, with increasing demands for scaling and constraints on hardware…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Sai Sena Chinnakonduru , Astarag Mohapatra

In the current landscape of large models, the Transformer stands as a cornerstone, playing a pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of modern models. However, its application encounters challenges attributed to the substantial computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-03 Gaoxiang Duan , Junkai Zhang , Xiaoying Zheng , Yongxin Zhu , Victor Chang

Attention mechanisms in deep neural networks have achieved excellent performance on sequence-prediction tasks. Here, we show that these recently-proposed attention-based mechanisms---in particular, the Transformer with its parallelizable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Zhengxuan Wu , Xiyu Zhang , Tan Zhi-Xuan , Jamil Zaki , Desmond C. Ong

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Paul Michel , Omer Levy , Graham Neubig

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann