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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

Modern language models rely on the transformer architecture and attention mechanism to perform language understanding and text generation. In this work, we study learning a 1-layer self-attention model from a set of prompts and associated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-22 M. Emrullah Ildiz , Yixiao Huang , Yingcong Li , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

Transformers are neural networks that revolutionized natural language processing and machine learning. They process sequences of inputs, like words, using a mechanism called self-attention, which is trained via masked language modeling…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-04-17 Riccardo Rende , Federica Gerace , Alessandro Laio , Sebastian Goldt

The rapid progress seen in terms of large-scale generative AI is largely based on the attention mechanism. It is conversely non-trivial to conceive small-scale applications for which attention-based architectures outperform traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Claudius Gros

Despite the empirical success of prompt tuning in adapting pretrained language models to new tasks, theoretical analyses of its capabilities remain limited. Existing theoretical work primarily addresses universal approximation properties,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Maxime Meyer , Mario Michelessa , Caroline Chaux , Vincent Y. F. Tan

Self-attention, an architectural motif designed to model long-range interactions in sequential data, has driven numerous recent breakthroughs in natural language processing and beyond. This work provides a theoretical analysis of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Benjamin L. Edelman , Surbhi Goel , Sham Kakade , Cyril Zhang

The self-attention module is a key component of Transformer-based models, wherein each token pays attention to every other token. Recent studies have shown that these heads exhibit syntactic, semantic, or local behaviour. Some studies have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Madhura Pande , Aakriti Budhraja , Preksha Nema , Pratyush Kumar , Mitesh M. Khapra

Transformer-based models are popularly used in natural language processing (NLP). Its core component, self-attention, has aroused widespread interest. To understand the self-attention mechanism, a direct method is to visualize the attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Han Shi , Jiahui Gao , Xiaozhe Ren , Hang Xu , Xiaodan Liang , Zhenguo Li , James T. Kwok

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in the field of long-context modeling, however, their inference computational costs have become a critical bottleneck hindering the advancement of tasks such as agents and multimodal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Di Xiu , Hongyin Tang , Bolin Rong , Lizhi Yan , Jingang Wang , Yifan Lu , Xunliang Cai

Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Chong Li , Shaonan Wang , Yunhao Zhang , Jiajun Zhang , Chengqing Zong

The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zichuan Fu , Wentao Song , Guojing Li , Yejing Wang , Xian Wu , Yimin Deng , Hanyu Yan , Yefeng Zheng , Xiangyu Zhao

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

With the advent of large models based on the Transformer architecture, researchers have observed an anomalous phenomenon in the Attention mechanism--there is a very high attention on the first element, which is prevalent across…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Ruiqing Yan , Xingbo Du , Haoyu Deng , Linghan Zheng , Qiuzhuang Sun , Jifang Hu , Yuhang Shao , Penghao Jiang , Jinrong Jiang , Lian Zhao

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) is a milestone in generative artificial intelligence, achieving significant success in text comprehension and generation tasks. Despite the tremendous success of LLMs in many downstream tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-16 He Li , Haoang Chi , Mingyu Liu , Wenjing Yang

Transformer models achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. They however suffer from a prohibitive limitation due to the self-attention mechanism, inducing $O(n^2)$ complexity with regard to sequence length. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Charles Condevaux , Sébastien Harispe

Transformer-based models have become ubiquitous in natural language processing thanks to their large capacity, innate parallelism and high performance. The contextualizing component of a Transformer block is the $\textit{pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

The powerful modeling capabilities of all-attention-based transformer architectures often cause overfitting and - for natural language processing tasks - lead to an implicitly learned internal language model in the autoregressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Timo Lohrenz , Björn Möller , Zhengyang Li , Tim Fingscheidt

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

Since the advent of ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs) have excelled in various tasks but remain as black-box systems. Understanding the reasoning bottlenecks of LLMs has become a critical challenge, as these limitations are deeply tied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Zifan Zheng , Yezhaohui Wang , Yuxin Huang , Shichao Song , Mingchuan Yang , Bo Tang , Feiyu Xiong , Zhiyu Li

Transformer has become the dominant architecture for sequence modeling, yet a detailed understanding of how its structural parameters influence expressive power remains limited. In this work, we study the approximation properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Penghao Yu , Haotian Jiang , Zeyu Bao , Ruoxi Yu , Qianxiao Li