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Intelligent systems must maintain and manipulate task-relevant information online to adapt to dynamic environments and changing goals. This capacity, known as working memory, is fundamental to human reasoning and intelligence. Despite…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hua-Dong Xiong , Li Ji-An , Jiaqi Huang , Robert C. Wilson , Kwonjoon Lee , Xue-Xin Wei

Transformer models have achieved remarkable results in a wide range of applications. However, their scalability is hampered by the quadratic time and memory complexity of the self-attention mechanism concerning the sequence length. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yury Nahshan , Joseph Kampeas , Emir Haleva

Transformers are emerging as the new workhorse of NLP, showing great success across tasks. Unlike LSTMs, transformers process input sequences entirely through self-attention. Previous work has suggested that the computational capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Michael Hahn

Learned self-attention functions in state-of-the-art NLP models often correlate with human attention. We investigate whether self-attention in large-scale pre-trained language models is as predictive of human eye fixation patterns during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Stephanie Brandl , Oliver Eberle , Jonas Pilot , Anders Søgaard

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Recent research has explored the memorization capacity of multi-head attention, but these findings are constrained by unrealistic limitations on the context size. We present a novel proof for language-based Transformers that extends the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Léo Dana , Muni Sreenivas Pydi , Yann Chevaleyre

Working memory, or the ability to hold and manipulate information in the mind, is a critical component of human intelligence and executive functioning. It is correlated with performance on various cognitive tasks, including measures of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Karin de Langis , Jong Inn Park , Bin Hu , Khanh Chi Le , Andreas Schramm , Michael C. Mensink , Andrew Elfenbein , Dongyeop Kang

Large pretrained self-attention neural networks, or transformers, have been very successful in various tasks recently. The performance of a model on a given task depends on its ability to memorize and generalize the training data. Large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Aki Härmä , Marcin Pietrasik , Anna Wilbik

We investigate the integration of human-like working memory constraints into the Transformer architecture and implement several cognitively inspired attention variants, including fixed-width windows based and temporal decay based attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Pranava Madhyastha , Dagmar Adamcova

The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Joshua Barron , Devin White

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

Large transformer models have shown extraordinary success in achieving state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing applications. However, training and deploying these models can be prohibitively costly for long sequences,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Sinong Wang , Belinda Z. Li , Madian Khabsa , Han Fang , Hao Ma

Despite the fact that Transformers perform well in NLP tasks, recent studies suggest that self-attention is theoretically limited in learning even some regular and context-free languages. These findings motivated us to think about their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Shunjie Wang , Shane Steinert-Threlkeld

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

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

Cognitive tasks originally developed for humans are now increasingly used to study language models. While applying these tasks is often straightforward, interpreting their results can be challenging. In particular, when a model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiaoyang Hu , Richard L. Lewis

Latest development of neural models has connected the encoder and decoder through a self-attention mechanism. In particular, Transformer, which is solely based on self-attention, has led to breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Xindian Ma , Peng Zhang , Shuai Zhang , Nan Duan , Yuexian Hou , Dawei Song , Ming Zhou

As the context window expands, self-attention increasingly dominates the transformer's inference time. Therefore, accelerating attention computation while minimizing performance degradation is essential for the efficient deployment of Large…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Eli Sason , Darya Frolova , Boris Nazarov , Felix Goldberd

Transformer models cannot easily scale to long sequences due to their O(N^2) time and space complexity. This has led to Transformer variants seeking to lower computational complexity, such as Longformer and Performer. While such models have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Guanghui Qin , Yukun Feng , Benjamin Van Durme

Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal
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