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Transformers, central to the successes in modern Natural Language Processing, often falter on arithmetic tasks despite their vast capabilities --which paradoxically include remarkable coding abilities. We observe that a crucial challenge is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Ruoqi Shen , Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Yin Tat Lee , Yuanzhi Li , Yi Zhang

Self-attention based Transformer has demonstrated the state-of-the-art performances in a number of natural language processing tasks. Self-attention is able to model long-term dependencies, but it may suffer from the extraction of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Guangxiang Zhao , Junyang Lin , Zhiyuan Zhang , Xuancheng Ren , Qi Su , Xu Sun

Standard attention mechanisms in transformers employ static token representations that remain unchanged across all pair-wise computations in each layer. This limits their representational alignment with the potentially diverse relational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hunjae Lee , Corey Clark

Recent studies have revealed various manifestations of position bias in transformer architectures, from the "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon to attention sinks, yet a comprehensive theoretical understanding of how attention masks and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xinyi Wu , Yifei Wang , Stefanie Jegelka , Ali Jadbabaie

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

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 become the de facto standard for a wide range of tasks, from image classification to physics simulations. Despite their impressive performance, the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers in both memory and time with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Alex Colagrande , Paul Caillon , Eva Feillet , Alexandre Allauzen

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

Transformers have achieved significant success across various domains, relying on self-attention to capture dependencies. However, the standard first-order attention mechanism is often limited by a low-rank bottleneck, struggling to capture…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Hanting Chen , Chong Zhu , Kai Han , Yuchuan Tian , Yuchen Liang , Tianyu Guo , Xinghao Chen , Dacheng Tao , Yunhe Wang

World modelling, i.e. building a representation of the rules that govern the world so as to predict its evolution, is an essential ability for any agent interacting with the physical world. Recent applications of the Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Francesco Petri , Luigi Asprino , Aldo Gangemi

Recently, the Transformer machine translation system has shown strong results by stacking attention layers on both the source and target-language sides. But the inference of this model is slow due to the heavy use of dot-product attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-27 Tong Xiao , Yinqiao Li , Jingbo Zhu , Zhengtao Yu , Tongran Liu

Pretrained transformer models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. These models leverage the attention mechanism to capture long- and short-range dependencies in the sequence. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Qingru Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Cole Hawkins , Sheng Zha , Tuo Zhao

Attention mechanisms have become a standard tool for sequence modeling tasks, in particular by stacking self-attention layers over the entire input sequence as in the Transformer architecture. In this work we introduce a novel attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Da Ju , Stephen Roller , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jason Weston

Motivated by the factorization inherent in the original fast multipole method and the improved fast Gauss transform we introduce a factorable form of attention that operates efficiently in high dimensions. This approach reduces the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Armin Gerami , Monte Hoover , Pranav S. Dulepet , Ramani Duraiswami

A promising approach to preserving model performance in linearized transformers is to employ position-based re-weighting functions. However, state-of-the-art re-weighting functions rely heavily on target sequence lengths, making it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Victor Agostinelli , Sanghyun Hong , Lizhong Chen

The quadratic computation complexity of self-attention has been a persistent challenge when applying Transformer models to vision tasks. Linear attention, on the other hand, offers a much more efficient alternative with its linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Dongchen Han , Xuran Pan , Yizeng Han , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Understanding the expressive power of transformers has recently attracted attention, as it offers insights into their abilities and limitations. Many studies analyze unique hard attention transformers, where attention selects a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Selim Jerad , Anej Svete , Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

Graph Transformers excel in long-range dependency modeling, but generally require quadratic memory complexity in the number of nodes in an input graph, and hence have trouble scaling to large graphs. Sparse attention variants such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Balaji Venkatachalam , Ameya Velingker , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nan Ding , Xinjie Fan , Zhenzhong Lan , Dale Schuurmans , Radu Soricut

Most approaches for semantic segmentation use only information from color cameras to parse the scenes, yet recent advancements show that using depth data allows to further improve performances. In this work, we focus on transformer-based…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Francesco Barbato , Giulia Rizzoli , Pietro Zanuttigh