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Related papers: Memorization in Attention-only Transformers

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Transformers have become central to natural language processing and large language models, but their deployment at scale faces three major challenges. First, the attention mechanism requires massive matrix multiplications and frequent…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Xiaoxuan Yang , Peilin Chen , Tergel Molom-Ochir , Yiran Chen

Memory is fundamental to intelligence, enabling learning, reasoning, and adaptability across biological and artificial systems. While Transformer architectures excel at sequence modeling, they face critical limitations in long-range context…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Parsa Omidi , Xingshuai Huang , Axel Laborieux , Bahareh Nikpour , Tianyu Shi , Armaghan Eshaghi

Transformers have emerged as a powerful neural network architecture capable of tackling a wide range of learning tasks. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of their ability to automatically extract structure from data in an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Pierre Marion , Claire Boyer

The Transformer translation model is based on the multi-head attention mechanism, which can be parallelized easily. The multi-head attention network performs the scaled dot-product attention function in parallel, empowering the model by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Hongfei Xu , Qiuhui Liu , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Transformer models gain popularity because of their superior inference accuracy and inference throughput. However, the transformer is computation-intensive, causing a long inference time. The existing works on transformer inference…

Performance · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Yuan Feng , Hyeran Jeon , Filip Blagojevic , Cyril Guyot , Qing Li , Dong Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prevalent in modern applications but often memorize training data, leading to privacy breaches and copyright issues. Existing research has mainly focused on posthoc analyses, such as extracting memorized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Tarun Ram Menta , Susmit Agrawal , Chirag Agarwal

In this paper, we propose a simple and effective technique to allow for efficient self-supervised learning with bi-directional Transformers. Our approach is motivated by recent studies demonstrating that self-attention patterns in trained…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-07 Ameet Deshpande , Karthik Narasimhan

Answering multi-hop reasoning questions requires retrieving and synthesizing information from diverse sources. Language models (LMs) struggle to perform such reasoning consistently. We propose an approach to pinpoint and rectify multi-hop…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Mansi Sakarvadia

Recent research has explored methods for updating and modifying factual knowledge in large language models, often focusing on specific multi-layer perceptron blocks. This study expands on this work by examining the effectiveness of existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Daniel Tamayo , Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre , Javier Hernando , Marta Villegas

The relationship between memorization and generalization in large language models (LLMs) remains an open area of research, with growing evidence that the two are deeply intertwined. In this work, we investigate this relationship by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Joshua Barron , Devin White

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 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

Existing analyses of the expressive capacity of Transformer models have required excessively deep layers for data memorization, leading to a discrepancy with the Transformers actually used in practice. This is primarily due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Tokio Kajitsuka , Issei Sato

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

Transformers have emerged as the architecture of choice for many state-of-the-art AI models, showcasing exceptional performance across a wide range of AI applications. However, the memory demands imposed by Transformers limit their ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Hao Liu , Matei Zaharia , Pieter Abbeel

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

Can we localize the weights and mechanisms used by a language model to memorize and recite entire paragraphs of its training data? In this paper, we show that while memorization is spread across multiple layers and model components,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-01 Niklas Stoehr , Mitchell Gordon , Chiyuan Zhang , Owen Lewis

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

While Transformers have shown remarkable success in natural language processing, their attention mechanism's large memory requirements have limited their ability to handle longer contexts. Prior approaches, such as recurrent memory or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-21 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi

Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. While these variants are memory and compute efficient,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Ankit Gupta , Guy Dar , Shaya Goodman , David Ciprut , Jonathan Berant