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Sequential self-attention models usually rely on additive positional embeddings, which inject positional information into item representations at the input. In the absence of positional signals, the attention block is…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Timur Nabiev , Evgeny Frolov

Transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art results on a variety of sequence modeling tasks. However, their attention mechanism comes with a quadratic complexity in sequence lengths, making the computational overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-03 Hao Peng , Jungo Kasai , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Zhaofeng Wu , Lingpeng Kong , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith

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

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko

Transformers encode structure in sequences via an expanding contextual history. However, their purely feedforward architecture fundamentally limits dynamic state tracking. State tracking -- the iterative updating of latent variables…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Michael C. Mozer , Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui , Rosanne Liu

Recent years have witnessed increasing interests in prompt-based learning in which models can be trained on only a few annotated instances, making them suitable in low-resource settings. When using prompt-based learning for text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Hongjing Li , Hanqi Yan , Yanran Li , Li Qian , Yulan He , Lin Gui

Attention mechanisms have become a standard tool for sequence modeling tasks, in particular by stacking self-attention layers over the entire input sequence as in the Transformer architecture. In this work we introduce a novel attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Da Ju , Stephen Roller , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jason Weston

Large-scale foundation models for scientific machine learning adapt to physical settings unseen during training, such as zero-shot transfer between turbulent scales. This phenomenon, in-context learning, challenges conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Anthony Bao , Jeffrey Lai , William Gilpin

Powerful generative artificial intelligence from large language models (LLMs) harnesses extensive computational resources for inference. In this work, we investigate the transformer architecture, a key component of these models, under the…

We present a geometric framework for understanding Transformer-based language models, drawing an explicit analogy to General Relativity. Queries and keys induce an effective metric on representation space, and attention acts as a discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Riccardo Di Sipio , Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez , Luis Serrano

We present an in-depth mechanistic interpretability analysis of training small transformers on an elementary task, counting, which is a crucial deductive step in many algorithms. In particular, we investigate the collaboration/competition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Pál Zsámboki , Ádám Fraknói , Máté Gedeon , András Kornai , Zsolt Zombori

Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Rya Sanovar , Srikant Bharadwaj , Renee St. Amant , Victor Rühle , Saravan Rajmohan

Transformer networks, driven by self-attention, are central to Large Language Models. In generative Transformers, self-attention uses cache memory to store token projections, avoiding recomputation at each time step. However, GPU-stored…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Nathan Leroux , Paul-Philipp Manea , Chirag Sudarshan , Jan Finkbeiner , Sebastian Siegel , John Paul Strachan , Emre Neftci

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

The incorporation of prior knowledge into learning is essential in achieving good performance based on small noisy samples. Such knowledge is often incorporated through the availability of related data arising from domains and tasks similar…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-24 Baruch Epstein , Ron Meir , Tomer Michaeli

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Zhenhai Zhu , Radu Soricut

Predictive process monitoring aims to support the execution of a process during runtime with various predictions about the further evolution of a process instance. In the last years a plethora of deep learning architectures have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Martin Käppel , Lars Ackermann , Stefan Jablonski , Simon Härtl

Although dominant in natural language processing, transformer-based models remain challenged by the task of long-sequence processing, because the computational cost of self-attention operations in transformers swells quadratically with the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Jiawen Xie , Pengyu Cheng , Xiao Liang , Yong Dai , Nan Du

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

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