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Sequence classification is the supervised learning task of building models that predict class labels of unseen sequences of symbols. Although accuracy is paramount, in certain scenarios interpretability is a must. Unfortunately, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-26 Severin Gsponer , Luca Costabello , Chan Le Van , Sumit Pai , Christophe Gueret , Georgiana Ifrim , Freddy Lecue

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

In many real-world scenarios, data to train machine learning models becomes available over time. Unfortunately, these models struggle to continually learn new concepts without forgetting what has been learnt in the past. This phenomenon is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-16 Beyza Ermis , Giovanni Zappella , Martin Wistuba , Aditya Rawal , Cedric Archambeau

Point cloud processing methods leverage local and global point features %at the feature level to cater to downstream tasks, yet they often overlook the task-level context inherent in point clouds during the encoding stage. We argue that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Yong He , Hongshan Yu , Chaoxu Mu , Mingtao Feng , Tongjia Chen , Zechuan Li , Anwaar Ulhaq , Ajmal Mian

Time series forecasting is essential for many practical applications, with the adoption of transformer-based models on the rise due to their impressive performance in NLP and CV. Transformers' key feature, the attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-09 PeiSong Niu , Tian Zhou , Xue Wang , Liang Sun , Rong Jin

Transformers have been successfully applied to sequential, auto-regressive tasks despite being feedforward networks. Unlike recurrent neural networks, Transformers use attention to capture temporal relations while processing input tokens in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Angela Fan , Thibaut Lavril , Edouard Grave , Armand Joulin , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Neural networks using transformer-based architectures have recently demonstrated great power and flexibility in modeling sequences of many types. One of the core components of transformer networks is the attention layer, which allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Matthew Spellings

Transformers have exhibited exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling tasks, leveraging self-attention and in-context learning. Critical to this success are induction heads, attention circuits that enable copying tokens based on their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Francesco D'Angelo , Francesco Croce , Nicolas Flammarion

This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Erwan Fagnou , Paul Caillon , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

We propose a synthetic reasoning task, LEGO (Learning Equality and Group Operations), that encapsulates the problem of following a chain of reasoning, and we study how the Transformer architectures learn this task. We pay special attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Yi Zhang , Arturs Backurs , Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Suriya Gunasekar , Tal Wagner

Transformers, as the fundamental deep learning architecture, have demonstrated great capability in reasoning. This paper studies the generalizable first-order logical reasoning ability of transformers with their parameterized knowledge and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Tianshi Zheng , Jiazheng Wang , Zihao Wang , Jiaxin Bai , Hang Yin , Zheye Deng , Yangqiu Song , Jianxin Li

We investigate the training of sparse layers that use different parameters for different inputs based on hashing in large Transformer models. Specifically, we modify the feedforward layer to hash to different sets of weights depending on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Stephen Roller , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Arthur Szlam , Jason Weston

Attention-based architectures, in particular transformers, are at the heart of a technological revolution. Interestingly, in addition to helping obtain state-of-the-art results on a wide range of applications, the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-22 Gianluigi Lopardo , Frederic Precioso , Damien Garreau

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

The use of deep pre-trained bidirectional transformers has led to remarkable progress in a number of applications (Devlin et al., 2018). For tasks that make pairwise comparisons between sequences, matching a given input with a corresponding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-03-27 Samuel Humeau , Kurt Shuster , Marie-Anne Lachaux , Jason Weston

Sequence labeling architectures use word embeddings for capturing similarity, but suffer when handling previously unseen or rare words. We investigate character-level extensions to such models and propose a novel architecture for combining…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-11-15 Marek Rei , Gamal K. O. Crichton , Sampo Pyysalo

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee

We introduce the Block Transformer which adopts hierarchical global-to-local modeling to autoregressive transformers to mitigate the inference bottlenecks associated with self-attention. Self-attention requires the key-value (KV) cache of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Namgyu Ho , Sangmin Bae , Taehyeon Kim , Hyunjik Jo , Yireun Kim , Tal Schuster , Adam Fisch , James Thorne , Se-Young Yun

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Real-world applications of object recognition often require the solution of multiple tasks in a single platform. Under the standard paradigm of network fine-tuning, an entirely new CNN is learned per task, and the final network size is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Pedro Morgado , Nuno Vasconcelos