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Scaling sequence length has become a critical demand in the era of large language models. However, existing methods struggle with either computational complexity or model expressivity, rendering the maximum sequence length restricted. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Jiayu Ding , Shuming Ma , Li Dong , Xingxing Zhang , Shaohan Huang , Wenhui Wang , Nanning Zheng , Furu Wei

While CNNs were long considered state of the art for image processing, the introduction of Transformer architectures has challenged this position. While achieving excellent results in image classification and segmentation, Transformers…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-25 DeShin Hwa , Tobias Holmes , Klaus Drechsler

Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

The self-attention mechanism, at the heart of the Transformer model, is able to effectively model pairwise interactions between tokens. However, numerous recent works have shown that it is unable to perform basic tasks involving detecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sayak Chakrabarti , Toniann Pitassi , Josh Alman

Standard inference and training with transformer based architectures scale quadratically with input sequence length. This is prohibitively large for a variety of applications especially in web-page translation, query-answering etc.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-03-20 Lovish Madaan , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Himanshu Jain , Prateek Jain

Attention is a key part of the transformer architecture. It is a sequence-to-sequence mapping that transforms each sequence element into a weighted sum of values. The weights are typically obtained as the softmax of dot products between…

Since the proposal of transformers, these models have been limited to bounded input lengths, because of their need to attend to every token in the input. In this work, we propose Unlimiformer: a general approach that wraps any existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Amanda Bertsch , Uri Alon , Graham Neubig , Matthew R. Gormley

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

The problem of efficient approximation of a linear operator induced by the Gaussian or softmax kernel is often addressed using random features (RFs) which yield an unbiased approximation of the operator's result. Such operators emerge in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-03 Valerii Likhosherstov , Krzysztof Choromanski , Avinava Dubey , Frederick Liu , Tamas Sarlos , Adrian Weller

We introduce Attention Graphs, a new tool for mechanistic interpretability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers based on the mathematical equivalence between message passing in GNNs and the self-attention mechanism in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Batu El , Deepro Choudhury , Pietro Liò , Chaitanya K. Joshi

Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari

One of the simplest and most effective classical machine learning algorithms is the $k$-nearest neighbors algorithm ($k$NN) which classifies an unknown test state by finding the $k$ nearest neighbors from a set of $M$ train states. Here we…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-06-18 Afrad Basheer , A. Afham , Sandeep K. Goyal

Transformers have been proven a successful model for a variety of tasks in sequence modeling. However, computing the attention matrix, which is their key component, has quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length, thus making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Apoorv Vyas , Angelos Katharopoulos , François Fleuret

$K$-NN classifier is one of the most famous classification algorithms, whose performance is crucially dependent on the distance metric. When we consider the distance metric as a parameter of $K$-NN, learning an appropriate distance metric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Kun Song

We propose the first method to show theoretical limitations for one-layer softmax transformers with arbitrarily many precision bits (even infinite). We establish those limitations for three tasks that require advanced reasoning. The first…

Attention mechanism has been used as an ancillary means to help RNN or CNN. However, the Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017) recently recorded the state-of-the-art performance in machine translation with a dramatic reduction in training time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Jinbae Im , Sungzoon Cho

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

The k-nearest neighbors (kNN) algorithm is a cornerstone of non-parametric classification in artificial intelligence, yet its deployment in large-scale applications is persistently constrained by the computational trade-off between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Jiaye Li , Gang Chen , Hang Xu , Shichao Zhang

In this paper, we apply the self-attention from the state-of-the-art Transformer in Attention Is All You Need for the first time to a data-driven operator learning problem related to partial differential equations. An effort is put together…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-02 Shuhao Cao