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Related papers: Selective Attention Improves Transformer

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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

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Jiaoda Li , Jennifer C. White , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Hemanth Saratchandran , Damien Teney , Simon Lucey

Despite the progress made in sentence-level NMT, current systems still fall short at achieving fluent, good quality translation for a full document. Recent works in context-aware NMT consider only a few previous sentences as context and may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-27 Sameen Maruf , André F. T. Martins , Gholamreza Haffari

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

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

Various forms of sparse attention have been explored to mitigate the quadratic computational and memory cost of the attention mechanism in transformers. We study sparse transformers not through a lens of efficiency but rather in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Parikshit Ram , Kenneth L. Clarkson , Tim Klinger , Shashanka Ubaru , Alexander G. Gray

Slim attention shrinks the context memory size by 2x for transformer models with MHA (multi-head attention), which can speed up inference by up to 2x for large context windows. Slim attention is an exact, mathematically identical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Nils Graef , Andrew Wasielewski

Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Neşet Özkan Tan , Alex Yuxuan Peng , Joshua Bensemann , Qiming Bao , Tim Hartill , Mark Gahegan , Michael Witbrock

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-15 Sai Surya Duvvuri , Inderjit S. Dhillon

This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Weicheng Ma , Kai Zhang , Renze Lou , Lili Wang , Soroush Vosoughi

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

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

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

Transformer tends to overallocate attention to irrelevant context. In this work, we introduce Diff Transformer, which amplifies attention to the relevant context while canceling noise. Specifically, the differential attention mechanism…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Tianzhu Ye , Li Dong , Yuqing Xia , Yutao Sun , Yi Zhu , Gao Huang , Furu Wei

Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Prakhar Thapak , Prodip Hore

The Transformer is an extremely powerful and prominent deep learning architecture. In this work, we challenge the commonly held belief in deep learning that going deeper is better, and show an alternative design approach that is building…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-10 Jason Ross Brown , Yiren Zhao , Ilia Shumailov , Robert D Mullins
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