Related papers: Homeostasis and Sparsity in Transformer
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…
Efficient Transformers have been developed for long sequence modeling, due to their subquadratic memory and time complexity. Sparse Transformer is a popular approach to improving the efficiency of Transformers by restricting self-attention…
Knowledge Tracing (KT) models face a critical ``Performance-Complexity Trap'': capturing complex cognitive dynamics like learning sessions and memory decay typically requires deep hierarchical architectures, which incur prohibitive…
Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…
Transformers are the de-facto choice for sequence modelling, yet their quadratic self-attention and weak temporal bias can make long-range forecasting both expensive and brittle. We introduce FreezeTST, a lightweight hybrid that interleaves…
Driven by the continuous development of models such as Multi-Layer Perceptron, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Transformer, deep learning has made breakthrough progress in fields such as computer vision and natural language…
We examine the intrinsic (within the attention head) and extrinsic (amongst the attention heads) structure of the self-attention mechanism in transformers. Theoretical evidence for invariance of the self-attention mechanism to softmax…
Transformer models can face practical limitations due to their high computational requirements. At the same time, such models exhibit significant activation sparsity, which can be leveraged to reduce the inference cost by converting parts…
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in complex tasks, yet their widespread adoption is impeded by substantial computational demands. With hundreds of billion parameters, transformer-based LLMs necessitate months of…
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…
The Transformer architecture, underpinned by the Multi-Head Attention (MHA) mechanism, has become the de facto standard for state-of-the-art models in artificial intelligence. However, the quadratic computational complexity of MHA with…
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…
In the world of deep learning, Transformer models have become very significant, leading to improvements in many areas from understanding language to recognizing images, covering a wide range of applications. Despite their success, the…
Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…
Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) set the state of the art in visual generation, yet their quadratic self-attention cost fundamentally limits scaling to long token sequences. Recent Top-K sparse attention approaches reduce the computation of…
Efficiently supporting long context length is crucial for Transformer models. The quadratic complexity of the self-attention computation plagues traditional Transformers. Sliding window-based static sparse attention mitigates the problem by…
We characterize the pre-softmax attention matrix $\mathbf{QK^\top}$ in transformers as an associative memory matrix encoding pairwise associations between input features. By decomposing this matrix into its symmetric and skew-symmetric…
Transformers have become foundational architectures for both natural language and computer vision tasks. However, the high computational cost makes it quite challenging to deploy on resource-constraint devices. This paper investigates the…
This paper introduces a high-order Markov chain task to investigate how transformers learn to integrate information from multiple past positions with varying statistical significance. We demonstrate that transformers learn this task…
We present a theoretical analysis of the Jacobian of an attention block within a transformer, showing that it is governed by the query, key, and value projections that define the attention mechanism. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a…