English
Related papers

Related papers: Are queries and keys always relevant? A case study…

200 papers

We introduce a generalized attention mechanism for spherical domains, enabling Transformer architectures to natively process data defined on the two-dimensional sphere - a critical need in fields such as atmospheric physics, cosmology, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-19 Boris Bonev , Max Rietmann , Andrea Paris , Alberto Carpentieri , Thorsten Kurth

We study two recurring phenomena in Transformer language models: massive activations, in which a small number of tokens exhibit extreme outliers in a few channels, and attention sinks, in which certain tokens attract disproportionate…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Shangwen Sun , Alfredo Canziani , Yann LeCun , Jiachen Zhu

Transformers have recently shown superior performances on various vision tasks. The large, sometimes even global, receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power over their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Zhuofan Xia , Xuran Pan , Shiji Song , Li Erran Li , Gao Huang

Recent work has shown that the encoder-decoder attention mechanisms in neural machine translation (NMT) are different from the word alignment in statistical machine translation. In this paper, we focus on analyzing encoder-decoder attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-10-18 Gongbo Tang , Rico Sennrich , Joakim Nivre

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

The Transformer-based model have made significant strides in semantic matching tasks by capturing connections between phrase pairs. However, to assess the relevance of sentence pairs, it is insufficient to just examine the general…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Bo Li , Di Liang , Zixin Zhang

Schr\"odinger's equation serves as a fundamental component in characterizing quantum systems, wherein both quantum state tomography and Hamiltonian learning are instrumental in comprehending and interpreting quantum systems. While numerous…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-01-25 Zheng An , Jiahui Wu , Muchun Yang , D. L. Zhou , Bei Zeng

This research endeavors to offer insights into unlocking the further potential of transformer-based architectures. One of the primary motivations is to offer a geometric interpretation for the attention mechanism in transformers. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhongping Ji

The Transformer architecture has inarguably revolutionized deep learning, overtaking classical architectures like multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). At its core, the attention block differs in form and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Weronika Ormaniec , Felix Dangel , Sidak Pal Singh

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

The great success of Transformer-based models benefits from the powerful multi-head self-attention mechanism, which learns token dependencies and encodes contextual information from the input. Prior work strives to attribute model decisions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yaru Hao , Li Dong , Furu Wei , Ke Xu

Attention mechanisms have seen wide adoption in neural NLP models. In addition to improving predictive performance, these are often touted as affording transparency: models equipped with attention provide a distribution over attended-to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Sarthak Jain , Byron C. Wallace

Deep learning models have been widely applied in various aspects of daily life. Many variant models based on deep learning structures have achieved even better performances. Attention-based architectures have become almost ubiquitous in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Zhiying Fang , Yidong Ouyang , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Guang Cheng

Unneeded elements in the attention's context degrade performance. We introduce Selective Attention, a simple parameter-free change to the standard attention mechanism which reduces attention to unneeded elements. Selective attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

Transformers have recently gained attention in the computer vision domain due to their ability to model long-range dependencies. However, the self-attention mechanism, which is the core part of the Transformer model, usually suffers from…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Reza Azad , René Arimond , Ehsan Khodapanah Aghdam , Amirhossein Kazerouni , Dorit Merhof

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

Attention-based Transformers have demonstrated strong adaptability across a wide range of tasks and have become the backbone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). However, their underlying mechanisms remain open for further exploration.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Ruifeng Ren , Sheng Ouyang , Huayi Tang , Yong Liu