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Transformers deliver outstanding performance across a wide range of tasks and are now a dominant backbone architecture for large language models (LLMs). Their task-solving performance is improved by increasing parameter size, as shown in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Hidetaka Kamigaito , Ying Zhang , Jingun Kwon , Katsuhiko Hayashi , Manabu Okumura , Taro Watanabe

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are a widely used deep architecture for sequence modeling, generation, and prediction. Despite success in applications such as machine translation and voice recognition, these stateful models have several…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-23 Ankur Mali , Alexander Ororbia , Daniel Kifer , Clyde Lee Giles

Sequence prediction and classification are ubiquitous and challenging problems in machine learning that can require identifying complex dependencies between temporally distant inputs. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have the ability, in…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2014-02-17 Jan Koutník , Klaus Greff , Faustino Gomez , Jürgen Schmidhuber

A key attribute that drives the unprecedented success of modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) on learning tasks which involve sequential data, is their ability to model intricate long-term temporal dependencies. However, a well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-07 Yoav Levine , Or Sharir , Alon Ziv , Amnon Shashua

Transformers are highly parallel but are limited to computations in the TC$^0$ complexity class, excluding tasks such as entity tracking and code execution that provably require greater expressive power. Motivated by this limitation, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Mayank Mishra , Shawn Tan , Ion Stoica , Joseph Gonzalez , Tri Dao

It is well understood that different neural network architectures are suited to different tasks, but is there always a single best architecture for a given task? We compare the expressive power of transformers, RNNs, and transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Gilad Yehudai , Noah Amsel , Joan Bruna

The Recurrent Neural Networks and their variants have shown promising performances in sequence modeling tasks such as Natural Language Processing. These models, however, turn out to be impractical and difficult to train when exposed to very…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-07-07 Yinchong Yang , Denis Krompass , Volker Tresp

Transformers have achieved great success in effectively processing sequential data such as text. Their architecture consisting of several attention and feedforward blocks can model relations between elements of a sequence in parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Jaemu Heo , Eldor Fozilov , Hyunmin Song , Taehwan Kim

While recurrent models have been effective in NLP tasks, their performance on context-free languages (CFLs) has been found to be quite weak. Given that CFLs are believed to capture important phenomena such as hierarchical structure in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-10 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

Despite recent successes in natural language processing and computer vision, Transformer suffers from the scalability problem when dealing with graphs. The computational complexity is unacceptable for large-scale graphs, e.g., knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Lingbing Guo , Qiang Zhang , Huajun Chen

Phoneme recognition is a very important part of speech recognition that requires the ability to extract phonetic features from multiple frames. In this paper, we compare and analyze CNN, RNN, Transformer, and Conformer models using phoneme…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-10-04 Kyuhong Shim , Wonyong Sung

This paper investigates the gap in representation powers of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and Transformers in the context of solving algorithmic problems. We focus on understanding whether RNNs, known for their memory efficiency in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Kaiyue Wen , Xingyu Dang , Kaifeng Lyu

Transformers have been established as the de-facto backbones for most recent advances in sequence modeling, mainly due to their growing memory capacity that scales with the context length. While plausible for retrieval tasks, it causes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Ali Behrouz , Zeman Li , Yuan Deng , Peilin Zhong , Meisam Razaviyayn , Vahab Mirrokni

Transformers have revolutionized the field of machine learning. In particular, they can be used to solve complex algorithmic problems, including graph-based tasks. In such algorithmic tasks a key question is what is the minimal size of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Gilad Yehudai , Clayton Sanford , Maya Bechler-Speicher , Orr Fischer , Ran Gilad-Bachrach , Amir Globerson

A promising approach to preserving model performance in linearized transformers is to employ position-based re-weighting functions. However, state-of-the-art re-weighting functions rely heavily on target sequence lengths, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Victor Agostinelli , Sanghyun Hong , Lizhong Chen

This study investigates the learnability of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) in classifying structured formal languages, focusing on counter and Dyck languages. Traditionally, both first-order (LSTM) and second-order (O2RNN) RNNs have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Neisarg Dave , Daniel Kifer , Lee Giles , Ankur Mali

Despite the remarkable practical success of transformer-based language models, recent work has raised concerns about their ability to perform state tracking. In particular, a growing body of literature has shown this limitation primarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 M. Reza Ebrahimi , Michaël Defferrard , Sunny Panchal , Roland Memisevic

The Linear Representation Hypothesis (LRH) states that neural networks learn to encode concepts as directions in activation space, and a strong version of the LRH states that models learn only such encodings. In this paper, we present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Róbert Csordás , Christopher Potts , Christopher D. Manning , Atticus Geiger

Earlier approaches indirectly studied the information captured by the hidden states of recurrent and non-recurrent neural machine translation models by feeding them into different classifiers. In this paper, we look at the encoder hidden…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Hamidreza Ghader , Christof Monz

Understanding what defines a good representation in large language models (LLMs) is fundamental to both theoretical understanding and practical applications. In this paper, we investigate the quality of intermediate representations in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Oscar Skean , Md Rifat Arefin , Yann LeCun , Ravid Shwartz-Ziv