Related papers: More Expressive Attention with Negative Weights
Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…
The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…
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…
While Transformer architecture excel at modeling long-range dependencies contributing to its widespread adoption in vision tasks the quadratic complexity of softmax-based attention mechanisms imposes a major bottleneck, particularly when…
We introduced a {\it working memory} augmented adaptive controller in our recent work. The controller uses attention to read from and write to the working memory. Attention allows the controller to read specific information that is relevant…
Transformer attention is typically implemented using softmax normalization, which enforces attention weights with unit sum normalization. While effective in many settings, this constraint can limit flexibility in controlling attention…
Attention mechanisms are ubiquitous components in neural architectures applied to natural language processing. In addition to yielding gains in predictive accuracy, attention weights are often claimed to confer interpretability, purportedly…
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…
We present a novel attention mechanism: Causal Attention (CATT), to remove the ever-elusive confounding effect in existing attention-based vision-language models. This effect causes harmful bias that misleads the attention module to focus…
Attention mechanisms have recently demonstrated impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, and attention scores are often used as a proxy for model explainability. However, there is a debate on whether attention weights can, in fact,…
In this paper, we seek solutions for reducing the computation complexity of transformer-based models for speech representation learning. We evaluate 10 attention algorithms; then, we pre-train the transformer-based model with those…
The attention mechanism lies at the core of the transformer architecture, providing an interpretable model-internal signal that has motivated a growing interest in attention-based model explanations. Although attention weights do not…
Unneeded elements in the attention's context degrade performance. We introduce Selective Attention, a simple parameter-free change to the standard attention mechanism which reduces attention to unneeded elements. Selective attention…
Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice. We bridge this gap by analyzing standard…
Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…
Dot-product attention has wide applications in computer vision and natural language processing. However, its memory and computational costs grow quadratically with the input size. Such growth prohibits its application on high-resolution…
The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into…
We introduce Attention Free Transformer (AFT), an efficient variant of Transformers that eliminates the need for dot product self attention. In an AFT layer, the key and value are first combined with a set of learned position biases, the…
Transformer has shown great successes in natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. As one of its core components, the softmax attention helps to capture long-range dependencies yet prohibits its scale-up due to the…
Attention mechanism has been regarded as an advanced technique to capture long-range feature interactions and to boost the representation capability for convolutional neural networks. However, we found two ignored problems in current…