Related papers: Self-Adjust Softmax
Attention mechanism is a central component of the transformer architecture which led to the phenomenal success of large language models. However, the theoretical principles underlying the attention mechanism are poorly understood,…
Vision Transformers have achieved impressive performance in video classification, while suffering from the quadratic complexity caused by the Softmax attention mechanism. Some studies alleviate the computational costs by reducing the number…
Random-feature-based attention (RFA) is an efficient approximation of softmax attention with linear runtime and space complexity. However, the approximation gap between RFA and conventional softmax attention is not well studied. Built upon…
Gating mechanisms have been widely utilized, from early models like LSTMs and Highway Networks to recent state space models, linear attention, and also softmax attention. Yet, existing literature rarely examines the specific effects of…
Despite achieving state-of-the-art results in nearly all Natural Language Processing applications, fine-tuning Transformer-based language models still requires a significant amount of labeled data to work. A well known technique to reduce…
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…
Softmax with the cross entropy loss is the standard configuration for current neural classification models. The gold score for a target class is supposed to be 1, but it is never reachable under the softmax schema. Such a problem makes the…
We introduce softpick, a rectified, not sum-to-one, drop-in replacement for softmax in transformer attention mechanisms that eliminates attention sink and massive activations. Our experiments with 340M and 1.8B parameter models demonstrate…
Softmax-based dot-product attention is a cornerstone of Transformer architectures, enabling remarkable capabilities such as in-context learning. However, as context lengths increase, a fundamental limitation of the softmax function emerges:…
The softmax representation of probabilities for categorical variables plays a prominent role in modern machine learning with numerous applications in areas such as large scale classification, neural language modeling and recommendation…
Previous research observed accuracy degradation when replacing the attention softmax with a point-wise activation such as ReLU. In the context of vision transformers, we find that this degradation is mitigated when dividing by sequence…
The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity…
The quadratic complexity of the attention mechanism represents one of the biggest hurdles for processing long sequences using Transformers. Current methods, relying on sparse representations or stateful recurrence, sacrifice token-to-token…
At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…
The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…
Modern autoregressive models rely on attention, yet the Softmax full attention in Transformers scales quadratically with sequence length. Sliding Window Attention (SWA) achieves linear-time encoding/decoding by constraining the attention…
While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…
Transformer-based scientific foundation models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, but current architectures give deterministic outputs and provide limited support for calibrated predictive uncertainty. We propose Stochastic…
Transformer is a powerful tool for many natural language tasks which is based on self-attention, a mechanism that encodes the dependence of other tokens on each specific token, but the computation of self-attention is a bottleneck due to…
Large language models have achieved remarkable success in recent years, primarily due to self-attention. However, traditional Softmax attention suffers from numerical instability and reduced performance as the number of inference tokens…