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Attention-based architectures have become ubiquitous in machine learning, yet our understanding of the reasons for their effectiveness remains limited. This work proposes a new way to understand self-attention networks: we show that their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Yihe Dong , Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas

Causal self-attention provides positional information to Transformer decoders. Prior work has shown that stacks of causal self-attention layers alone induce a positional bias in attention scores toward earlier tokens. However, this differs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Junu Kim , Xiao Liu , Zhenghao Lin , Lei Ji , Yeyun Gong , Edward Choi

We demonstrate that replacing an LSTM encoder with a self-attentive architecture can lead to improvements to a state-of-the-art discriminative constituency parser. The use of attention makes explicit the manner in which information is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-05-04 Nikita Kitaev , Dan Klein

In this paper, we contend that the objective of representation learning is to compress and transform the distribution of the data, say sets of tokens, towards a mixture of low-dimensional Gaussian distributions supported on incoherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Yaodong Yu , Sam Buchanan , Druv Pai , Tianzhe Chu , Ziyang Wu , Shengbang Tong , Benjamin D. Haeffele , Yi Ma

The self-attention mechanism, at the heart of the Transformer model, is able to effectively model pairwise interactions between tokens. However, numerous recent works have shown that it is unable to perform basic tasks involving detecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sayak Chakrabarti , Toniann Pitassi , Josh Alman

Large Language Models (LLMs) based on autoregressive, decoder-only Transformers generate text one token at a time, where a token represents a discrete unit of text. As each newly produced token is appended to the partial output sequence,…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Dimitrios Kafetzis , Ramin Khalili , Iordanis Koutsopoulos

Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Xiaojie Xia , Huigang Zhang , Chaoliang Zhong , Jun Sun , Yusuke Oishi

Autoregressive attention-based time series forecasting (TSF) has drawn increasing interest, with mechanisms like linear attention sometimes outperforming vanilla attention. However, deeper Transformer architectures frequently misalign with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Shihao Yang

Temporal causal analysis means understanding the underlying causes behind observed variables over time. Deep learning based methods such as transformers are increasingly used to capture temporal dynamics and causal relationships beyond mere…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Riya Mahesh , Rahul Vashisht , Chandrashekar Lakshminarayanan

Autoregressive language models trained with next-token prediction generate text by sampling one discrete token at a time. Although very scalable, this objective forces the model to commit at every step, preventing it from exploring or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Lorenzo Noci , Gregor Bachmann , Seyed-Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli , Moin Nabi

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

This work aims to predict channels in wireless communication systems based on noisy observations, utilizing sequence-to-sequence models with attention (Seq2Seq-attn) and transformer models. Both models are adapted from natural language…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-05 Valentina Rizzello , Benedikt Böck , Michael Joham , Wolfgang Utschick

Transformer networks have lead to important progress in language modeling and machine translation. These models include two consecutive modules, a feed-forward layer and a self-attention layer. The latter allows the network to capture long…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Edouard Grave , Guillaume Lample , Herve Jegou , Armand Joulin

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of domains, but their quadratic attention mechanism poses significant challenges for long-sequence modelling. Recent efforts to design linear-time attention mechanisms have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Rares Dolga , Lucas Maystre , Marius Cobzarenco , David Barber

Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Jinbae Im , Sungzoon Cho

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

In this work, we present Detective - an attentive object detector that identifies objects in images in a sequential manner. Our network is based on an encoder-decoder architecture, where the encoder is a convolutional neural network, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Amine Kechaou , Manuel Martinez , Monica Haurilet , Rainer Stiefelhagen

Self-attention-based networks have achieved remarkable performance in sequential recommendation tasks. A crucial component of these models is positional encoding. In this study, we delve into the learned positional embedding, demonstrating…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-11-27 Fan Luo , Haibo He , Juan Zhang , Shenghui Xu

To improve the robustness of transformer neural networks used for temporal-dynamics prediction of chaotic systems, we propose a novel attention mechanism called easy attention which we demonstrate in time-series reconstruction and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Marcial Sanchis-Agudo , Yuning Wang , Roger Arnau , Luca Guastoni , Jasmin Lim , Karthik Duraisamy , Ricardo Vinuesa

Attention is a key component of the now ubiquitous pre-trained language models. By learning to focus on relevant pieces of information, these Transformer-based architectures have proven capable of tackling several tasks at once and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Vincent Micheli , Quentin Heinrich , François Fleuret , Wacim Belblidia