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Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yutao Sun , Zhenyu Li , Yike Zhang , Tengyu Pan , Bowen Dong , Yuyi Guo , Jianyong Wang

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) studies agents that, after pretraining, adapt to new tasks by conditioning on additional context without parameter updates. Existing theoretical analyses of ICRL largely rely on linear attention,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zixuan Xie , Xinyu Liu , Claire Chen , Shuze Daniel Liu , Rohan Chandra , Shangtong Zhang

Large-scale foundation models for scientific machine learning adapt to physical settings unseen during training, such as zero-shot transfer between turbulent scales. This phenomenon, in-context learning, challenges conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Anthony Bao , Jeffrey Lai , William Gilpin

Recently, a considerable number of studies in computer vision involves deep neural architectures called vision transformers. Visual processing in these models incorporates computational models that are claimed to implement attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Paria Mehrani , John K. Tsotsos

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

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

Transformers architecture apply self-attention to tokens represented as vectors, before a fully connected (neuronal network) layer. These two parts can be layered many times. Traditionally, self-attention is seen as a mechanism for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Evgeniy Shin , Heinrich Matzinger

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…

Deriving formal bounds on the expressivity of transformers, as well as studying transformers that are constructed to implement known algorithms, are both effective methods for better understanding the computational power of transformers.…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Andy Yang , David Chiang

Pre-trained transformers exhibit the capability of adapting to new tasks through in-context learning (ICL), where they efficiently utilize a limited set of prompts without explicit model optimization. The canonical communication problem of…

Transformer language models have driven significant progress across various fields, including natural language processing and computer vision. A central component of these models is the self-attention (SA) mechanism, which learns rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Suvadeep Hajra

Transformer networks have emerged as the state-of-the-art approach for natural language processing tasks and are gaining popularity in other domains such as computer vision and audio processing. However, the efficient hardware acceleration…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-07-29 Gamze İslamoğlu , Moritz Scherer , Gianna Paulin , Tim Fischer , Victor J. B. Jung , Angelo Garofalo , Luca Benini

The transformer architecture has driven breakthroughs in recent years on tasks which require modeling pairwise relationships between sequential elements, as is the case in natural language understanding. However, long seqeuences pose a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Heejun Lee , Jina Kim , Jeffrey Willette , Sung Ju Hwang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Ivan Kobyzev , Abbas Ghaddar , Dingtao Hu , Boxing Chen

Transformers, and the attention mechanism in particular, have become ubiquitous in machine learning. Their success in modeling nonlocal, long-range correlations has led to their widespread adoption in natural language processing, computer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Edoardo Calvello , Nikola B. Kovachki , Matthew E. Levine , Andrew M. Stuart

Transformers have excelled in many tasks including vision. However, efficient deployment of transformer models in low-latency or high-throughput applications is hindered by the computation in the attention mechanism which involves expensive…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-12 John Yang , Le An , Su Inn Park

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance across various tasks, but suffer from a notable quadratic complexity in sequence length due to the attention mechanism. In this work, we propose MonarchAttention -- a novel approach to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Can Yaras , Alec S. Xu , Pierre Abillama , Changwoo Lee , Laura Balzano

Transformer tends to overallocate attention to irrelevant context. In this work, we introduce Diff Transformer, which amplifies attention to the relevant context while canceling noise. Specifically, the differential attention mechanism…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Tianzhu Ye , Li Dong , Yuqing Xia , Yutao Sun , Yi Zhu , Gao Huang , Furu Wei

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang

Vision transformers (ViTs) have pushed the state-of-the-art for various visual recognition tasks by patch-wise image tokenization followed by self-attention. However, the employment of self-attention modules results in a quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-05-03 Jiachen Lu , Jinghan Yao , Junge Zhang , Xiatian Zhu , Hang Xu , Weiguo Gao , Chunjing Xu , Tao Xiang , Li Zhang
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