English
Related papers

Related papers: Selective Attention Improves Transformer

200 papers

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Gerard Sant , Gerard I. Gállego , Belen Alastruey , Marta R. Costa-Jussà

We introduce exclusive self attention (XSA), a simple modification of self attention (SA) that improves Transformer's sequence modeling performance. The key idea is to constrain attention to capture only information orthogonal to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Shuangfei Zhai

Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Paul Michel , Omer Levy , Graham Neubig

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

Multilingual transformer-based models demonstrate remarkable zero and few-shot transfer across languages by learning and reusing language-agnostic features. However, as a fixed-size model acquires more languages, its performance across all…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-08 William Held , Diyi Yang

Transformer-based language models have found many diverse applications requiring them to process sequences of increasing length. For these applications, the causal self-attention -- which is the only component scaling quadratically w.r.t.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Matteo Pagliardini , Daniele Paliotta , Martin Jaggi , François Fleuret

The multi-head self-attention of popular transformer models is widely used within Natural Language Processing (NLP), including for the task of extractive summarization. With the goal of analyzing and pruning the parameter-heavy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Wen Xiao , Patrick Huber , Giuseppe Carenini

Transformer-based models have brought a radical change to neural machine translation. A key feature of the Transformer architecture is the so-called multi-head attention mechanism, which allows the model to focus simultaneously on different…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Alessandro Raganato , Yves Scherrer , Jörg Tiedemann

An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-20 Kaiser Sun , Ana Marasović

While Transformer-based models have shown impressive language modeling performance, the large computation cost is often prohibitive for practical use. Attention head pruning, which removes unnecessary attention heads in the multihead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-10-08 Kyuhong Shim , Iksoo Choi , Wonyong Sung , Jungwook Choi

The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-08 Michael Hassid , Hao Peng , Daniel Rotem , Jungo Kasai , Ivan Montero , Noah A. Smith , Roy Schwartz

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

Transformer-based models excel in speech recognition. Existing efforts to optimize Transformer inference, typically for long-context applications, center on simplifying attention score calculations. However, streaming speech recognition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Yang Li , Liangzhen Lai , Yuan Shangguan , Forrest N. Iandola , Zhaoheng Ni , Ernie Chang , Yangyang Shi , Vikas Chandra

The key to a Transformer model is the self-attention mechanism, which allows the model to analyze an entire sequence in a computationally efficient manner. Recent work has suggested the possibility that general attention mechanisms used by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Thomas Dowdell , Hongyu Zhang

Recently multimodal transformer models have gained popularity because their performance on language and vision tasks suggest they learn rich visual-linguistic representations. Focusing on zero-shot image retrieval tasks, we study three…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Lisa Anne Hendricks , John Mellor , Rosalia Schneider , Jean-Baptiste Alayrac , Aida Nematzadeh

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 transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yihe Dong , Lorenzo Noci , Mikhail Khodak , Mufan Li

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning in numerous fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Their strength lies in their attention mechanism, which allows for the discovering of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Uladzislau Yorsh , Martin Holeňa , Ondřej Bojar , David Herel

Multi-head attention, a collection of several attention mechanisms that independently attend to different parts of the input, is the key ingredient in the Transformer. Recent work has shown, however, that a large proportion of the heads in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell , Mrinmaya Sachan