English
Related papers

Related papers: Positional Attention: Expressivity and Learnabilit…

200 papers

Attention mechanism has become the dominant module in natural language processing models. It is computationally intensive and depends on massive power-hungry multiplications. In this paper, we rethink variants of attention mechanism from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Yu Wan , Baosong Yang , Dayiheng Liu , Rong Xiao , Derek F. Wong , Haibo Zhang , Boxing Chen , Lidia S. Chao

The state of the art in learning meaningful semantic representations of words is the Transformer model and its attention mechanisms. Simply put, the attention mechanisms learn to attend to specific parts of the input dispensing recurrence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-24 Dongsheng Wang , Casper Hansen , Lucas Chaves Lima , Christian Hansen , Maria Maistro , Jakob Grue Simonsen , Christina Lioma

Transformers are state-of-the-art models for a variety of sequence modeling tasks. At their core is an attention function which models pairwise interactions between the inputs at every timestep. While attention is powerful, it does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-03-23 Hao Peng , Nikolaos Pappas , Dani Yogatama , Roy Schwartz , Noah A. Smith , Lingpeng Kong

Many machine learning tasks such as multiple instance learning, 3D shape recognition, and few-shot image classification are defined on sets of instances. Since solutions to such problems do not depend on the order of elements of the set,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Juho Lee , Yoonho Lee , Jungtaek Kim , Adam R. Kosiorek , Seungjin Choi , Yee Whye Teh

The Transformer architecture is widely deployed in many popular and impactful Large Language Models. At its core is the attention mechanism for calculating correlations between pairs of tokens. Performing an attention computation takes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Josh Alman , Hantao Yu

In this paper we delve deep in the Transformer architecture by investigating two of its core components: self-attention and contextual embeddings. In particular, we study the identifiability of attention weights and token embeddings, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Gino Brunner , Yang Liu , Damián Pascual , Oliver Richter , Massimiliano Ciaramita , Roger Wattenhofer

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

Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Laziz Abdullaev , Tan M. Nguyen

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

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Attention mechanisms have seen wide adoption in neural NLP models. In addition to improving predictive performance, these are often touted as affording transparency: models equipped with attention provide a distribution over attended-to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Sarthak Jain , Byron C. Wallace

We show that a constant number of self-attention layers can efficiently simulate, and be simulated by, a constant number of communication rounds of Massively Parallel Computation. As a consequence, we show that logarithmic depth is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

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-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

Recent advancements in transformer-based models have greatly improved time series analysis, providing robust solutions for tasks such as forecasting, anomaly detection, and classification. A crucial element of these models is positional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Habib Irani , Vangelis Metsis

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

We study the problem of learning Transformer-based sequence models with black-box access to their outputs. In this setting, a learner may adaptively query the oracle with any sequence of vectors and observe the output of the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kulin Shah , Michael Hahn , Varun Kanade

Due to their architecture and how they are trained, artificial neural networks are typically not robust toward pruning or shuffling layers at test time. However, such properties would be desirable for different applications, such as…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Matthias Freiberger , Peter Kun , Anders Sundnes Løvlie , Sebastian Risi

In traditional machine learning, models are defined by a set of parameters, which are optimized to perform specific tasks. In neural networks, these parameters correspond to the synaptic weights. However, in reality, it is often infeasible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Ofir Schlisselberg , Ran Darshan

Attention, specifically scaled dot-product attention, has proven effective for natural language, but it does not have a mechanism for handling hierarchical patterns of arbitrary nesting depth, which limits its ability to recognize certain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Brian DuSell , David Chiang