Related papers: Simulating Hard Attention Using Soft Attention
We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…
Time series forecasting is essential for many practical applications, with the adoption of transformer-based models on the rise due to their impressive performance in NLP and CV. Transformers' key feature, the attention mechanism,…
Transformers have proven highly effective across various applications, especially in handling sequential data such as natural languages and time series. However, transformer models often lack clear interpretability, and the success of…
We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…
We investigate how sentence-level transformers can be modified into effective sequence labelers at the token level without any direct supervision. Existing approaches to zero-shot sequence labeling do not perform well when applied on…
The debate around the interpretability of attention mechanisms is centered on whether attention scores can be used as a proxy for the relative amounts of signal carried by sub-components of data. We propose to study the interpretability of…
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…
Soft attention in Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) is susceptible to incorporating irrelevant information from the context into its latent representations, which adversely affects next token generations. To help rectify these…
Transformer architectures deliver state-of-the-art accuracy via dense full-attention, but their quadratic time and memory complexity with respect to sequence length limits practical deployment. Linear attention mechanisms offer linear or…
Current hierarchical attention methods, such as NSA and InfLLMv2, select the top-k relevant key-value (KV) blocks based on coarse attention scores and subsequently apply fine-grained softmax attention on the selected tokens. However, the…
We introduce $\Sigma$-Attention, a Transformer-based operator-learning framework to address a key computational challenge in correlated materials. Our approach utilizes an Encoder-Only Transformer as an ansatz to approximate the self-energy…
Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) plays a key role in advancing human-computer interaction. Attention mechanisms have become the dominant approach for modeling emotional speech due to their ability to capture long-range dependencies and…
Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…
Transformer-based models, even though achieving super-human performance on several downstream tasks, are often regarded as a black box and used as a whole. It is still unclear what mechanisms they have learned, especially their core module:…
While transformer models exhibit strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities, they often fail to generalize under simple distribution shifts. We analyze these failures and identify Softmax, the scoring function in the attention mechanism, as…
Real-world problems often involve complex and unstructured sets of measurements, which occur when sensors are sparsely placed in either space or time. Being able to model this irregular spatiotemporal data and extract meaningful forecasts…
Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…
Point cloud processing methods leverage local and global point features %at the feature level to cater to downstream tasks, yet they often overlook the task-level context inherent in point clouds during the encoding stage. We argue that…
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…
Transformers have achieved great success in recent years. Interestingly, transformers have shown particularly strong in-context learning capability -- even without fine-tuning, they are still able to solve unseen tasks well purely based on…