Related papers: Provable optimal transport with transformers: The …
Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…
This work proposes an extensive analysis of the Transformer architecture in the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) setting. Focusing on the encoder-decoder attention mechanism, we prove that attention weights systematically make alignment…
Transformers are extremely successful machine learning models whose mathematical properties remain poorly understood. Here, we rigorously characterize the behavior of transformers with hardmax self-attention and normalization sublayers as…
This thesis examines self-attention training through the lens of Optimal Transport (OT) and develops an OT-based alternative for tabular classification. The study tracks intermediate projections of the self-attention layer during training…
Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…
Despite their central role in the success of foundational models and large-scale language modeling, the theoretical foundations governing the operation of Transformers remain only partially understood. Contemporary research has largely…
Token embeddings play a crucial role in language modeling but, despite this practical relevance, their theoretical understanding remains limited. Our paper addresses the gap by characterizing the structure of embeddings obtained via…
Large language models (LLMs) are known for their exceptional performance in natural language processing, making them highly effective in many human life-related or even job-related tasks. The attention mechanism in the Transformer…
Despite its original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, prior researches suggest that Transformer captures poor word alignments through its attention mechanism. In this paper, we show that attention weights DO capture accurate…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning (ICL) capabilities. The strong ICL performance of transformers is commonly believed to arise from their ability to implicitly execute certain algorithms on the context, thereby…
Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…
The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…
Selecting input features of top relevance has become a popular method for building self-explaining models. In this work, we extend this selective rationalization approach to text matching, where the goal is to jointly select and align text…
LLMs demonstrate significant inference capacities in complicated machine learning tasks, using the Transformer model as its backbone. Motivated by the limited understanding of such models on the unsupervised learning problems, we study the…
Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…
The geometric evolution of token representations in large language models (LLMs) presents a fundamental paradox: while human language inherently organizes semantic information in low-dimensional spaces ($\sim 10^1$ dimensions), modern LLMs…
Multi-layer models with multiple attention heads per layer provide superior translation quality compared to simpler and shallower models, but determining what source context is most relevant to each target word is more challenging as a…
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have shown remarkable performance but remain largely opaque in their decision making processes. The interpretability of these models, especially their internal attention mechanisms, is critical for…
The state of the art in machine translation (MT) is governed by neural approaches, which typically provide superior translation accuracy over statistical approaches. However, on the closely related task of word alignment, traditional…
Despite their original goal to jointly learn to align and translate, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models, especially Transformer, are often perceived as not learning interpretable word alignments. In this paper, we show that NMT models…