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Related papers: Reducing the Transformer Architecture to a Minimum

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Transformer plays a central role in many fundamental deep learning models, e.g., the ViT in computer vision and the BERT and GPT in natural language processing, whose effectiveness is mainly attributed to its multi-head attention (MHA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Shen Yuan , Hongteng Xu

The Transformer architecture has inarguably revolutionized deep learning, overtaking classical architectures like multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs). At its core, the attention block differs in form and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Weronika Ormaniec , Felix Dangel , Sidak Pal Singh

The attention operator is arguably the key distinguishing factor of transformer architectures, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks. However, transformer attention operators often impose a significant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Ziyang Wu , Tianjiao Ding , Yifu Lu , Druv Pai , Jingyuan Zhang , Weida Wang , Yaodong Yu , Yi Ma , Benjamin D. Haeffele

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are the go-to model for computer vision. Recently, attention-based networks, such as the Vision Transformer, have also become popular. In this paper we show that while convolutions and attention are both…

Transformer models typically calculate attention matrices using dot products, which have limitations when capturing nonlinear relationships between embedding vectors. We propose Neural Attention, a technique that replaces dot products with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Andrew DiGiugno , Ausif Mahmood

Large Language Models (LLMs), built on Transformer architectures, exhibit remarkable generalization across a wide range of tasks. However, fine-tuning these models for specific tasks remains resource-intensive due to their extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Xinhao Yao , Hongjin Qian , Xiaolin Hu , Gengze Xu , Wei Liu , Jian Luan , Bin Wang , Yong Liu

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

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev

This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Michel Fabrice Serret

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 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

The Transformer architecture has dominated machine learning in a wide range of tasks. The specific characteristic of this architecture is an expensive scaled dot-product attention mechanism that models the inter-token interactions, which is…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Zizhao Hu , Mohammad Rostami

Transformers have shown great potential in computer vision tasks. A common belief is their attention-based token mixer module contributes most to their competence. However, recent works show the attention-based module in Transformers can be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-05 Weihao Yu , Mi Luo , Pan Zhou , Chenyang Si , Yichen Zhou , Xinchao Wang , Jiashi Feng , Shuicheng Yan

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

The Transformer is a fully attention-based alternative to recurrent networks that has achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of NLP tasks. In this paper, we analyze the structure of attention in a Transformer language model, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Jesse Vig , Yonatan Belinkov

While attention-based transformer networks achieve unparalleled success in nearly all language tasks, the large number of tokens (pixels) found in images coupled with the quadratic activation memory usage makes them prohibitive for problems…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-20 George Cazenavette , Manuel Ladron De Guevara

Embedding layers in transformer-based NLP models typically account for the largest share of model parameters, scaling with vocabulary size but not yielding performance gains proportional to scale. We propose an alternative approach in which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-06 Henry Ndubuaku , Mouad Talhi

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

Attention mechanisms are a central property of cognitive systems allowing them to selectively deploy cognitive resources in a flexible manner. Attention has been long studied in the neurosciences and there are numerous phenomenological…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-11 Ryan Singh , Christopher L. Buckley

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida