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Standard attention mechanisms in transformers employ static token representations that remain unchanged across all pair-wise computations in each layer. This limits their representational alignment with the potentially diverse relational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hunjae Lee , Corey Clark

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized artificial intelligence, yet a principled theoretical understanding of its internal mechanisms remains elusive. This paper introduces a novel analytical framework that reconceptualizes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yukun Zhang , Xueqing Zhou

In deep learning theory, the covariance matrix of the representations serves as a proxy to examine the network's trainability. Motivated by the success of Transformers, we study the covariance matrix of a modified Softmax-based attention…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-12-12 Lorenzo Noci , Chuning Li , Mufan Bill Li , Bobby He , Thomas Hofmann , Chris Maddison , Daniel M. Roy

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

Despite the remarkable empirical performance of Transformers, their theoretical understanding remains elusive. Here, we consider a deep multi-head self-attention network, that is closely related to Transformers yet analytically tractable.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Lorenzo Tiberi , Francesca Mignacco , Kazuki Irie , Haim Sompolinsky

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

Dynamic graph learning plays a pivotal role in modeling evolving relationships over time, especially for temporal link prediction tasks in domains such as traffic systems, social networks, and recommendation platforms. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Tao Zou , Chengfeng Wu , Tianxi Liao , Junchen Ye , Bowen Du

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

Transformers empirically perform precise probabilistic reasoning in carefully constructed ``Bayesian wind tunnels'' and in large-scale language models, yet the mechanisms by which gradient-based learning creates the required internal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Naman Agarwal , Siddhartha R. Dalal , Vishal Misra

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

While convolutional neural networks have shown a tremendous impact on various computer vision tasks, they generally demonstrate limitations in explicitly modeling long-range dependencies due to the intrinsic locality of the convolution…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-06 Guanglei Yang , Hao Tang , Mingli Ding , Nicu Sebe , Elisa Ricci

Transductive tasks on graphs differ fundamentally from typical supervised machine learning tasks, as the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) assumption does not hold among samples. Instead, all train/test/validation samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Hamed Shirzad , Honghao Lin , Ameya Velingker , Balaji Venkatachalam , David Woodruff , Danica Sutherland

The quadratic complexity of dot-product attention introduced in Transformer remains a fundamental bottleneck impeding the progress of foundation models toward unbounded context lengths. Addressing this challenge, we introduce the Deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Yifan Zhang

Transformer architecture has shown impressive performance in multiple research domains and has become the backbone of many neural network models. However, there is limited understanding on how it works. In particular, with a simple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Yuandong Tian , Yiping Wang , Beidi Chen , Simon Du

Graph Transformers, which incorporate self-attention and positional encoding, have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various graph learning tasks. Despite their impressive performance, the complex non-convex interactions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Tengfei Ma , Sijia Liu , Zaixi Zhang , Pin-Yu Chen

Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai

Transformers have shown strong ability to model long-term dependencies and are increasingly adopted as world models in model-based reinforcement learning (RL) under partial observability. However, unlike natural language corpora, RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Daniel De Dios Allegue , Jinke He , Frans A. Oliehoek

Transformer-based models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of domains, yet our understanding of their training dynamics remains limited. In this work, we identify a recurrent focus-dilution cycle in attention learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Zheng-An Chen , Pengxiao Lin , Zhi-Qin John Xu , Tao Luo

We propose Axial Transformers, a self-attention-based autoregressive model for images and other data organized as high dimensional tensors. Existing autoregressive models either suffer from excessively large computational resource…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Jonathan Ho , Nal Kalchbrenner , Dirk Weissenborn , Tim Salimans

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee