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A central problem related to transformers can be stated as follows: given two $n \times d$ matrices $Q$ and $K$, and a non-negative function $f$, define the matrix $A$ as follows: (1) apply the function $f$ to each entry of the $n \times n$…
Backpropagation is the default learning rule for artificial neural networks and is often treated as the settled approach whenever differentiability is available. In this work, we revisit this convention through a theoretical lens of sample…
Transformers have revolutionized natural language processing, but their quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length remains a fundamental bottleneck for long-range modeling. While sparse attention mechanisms like RingAttention…
The gradients used to train neural networks are typically computed using backpropagation. While an efficient way to obtain exact gradients, backpropagation is computationally expensive, hinders parallelization, and is biologically…
We propose a variational quantum implementation of self-attention (QSA), the core operation in transformers and large language models, which predicts future elements of a sequence by forming overlap-weighted combinations of past data. At…
Deploying transformer models in practice is challenging due to their inference cost, which scales quadratically with input sequence length. To address this, we present a novel Learned Token Pruning (LTP) method which adaptively removes…
We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…
Despite recent advances in training recurrent neural networks (RNNs), capturing long-term dependencies in sequences remains a fundamental challenge. Most approaches use backpropagation through time (BPTT), which is difficult to scale to…
Standard transformer architectures apply a single attention mechanism uniformly across all tokens and sequence positions, irrespective of local context or computational budget. We propose Meta-Attention, a framework that dynamically routes…
Following the success of dot-product attention in Transformers, numerous approximations have been recently proposed to address its quadratic complexity with respect to the input length. While these variants are memory and compute efficient,…
In modern large language models (LLMs), increasing the context length is crucial for improving comprehension and coherence in long-context, multi-modal, and retrieval-augmented language generation. While many recent transformer models…
Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…
Efficient inference on GPUs using large language models remains challenging due to memory bandwidth limitations, particularly during data transfers between High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and SRAM in attention computations. Approximate…
Gradient-flow analyses show that simplified linear transformers can learn the in-context linear-regression algorithm, but they do not explain the finite-step behavior of gradient descent at large learning rates. Motivated by empirical work…
Attention mechanisms play a crucial role in the neural revolution of Natural Language Processing (NLP). With the growth of attention-based models, several pruning techniques have been developed to identify and exploit sparseness, making…
We propose a memory efficient method, named Stochastic Backpropagation (SBP), for training deep neural networks on videos. It is based on the finding that gradients from incomplete execution for backpropagation can still effectively train…
To improve the robustness of transformer neural networks used for temporal-dynamics prediction of chaotic systems, we propose a novel attention mechanism called easy attention which we demonstrate in time-series reconstruction and…
The Transformer has emerged as a versatile and effective architecture with broad applications. However, it still remains an open problem how to efficiently train a Transformer model of high utility with differential privacy guarantees. In…
We describe recurrent neural networks (RNNs), which have attracted great attention on sequential tasks, such as handwriting recognition, speech recognition and image to text. However, compared to general feedforward neural networks, RNNs…
The attention mechanism is considered the backbone of the widely-used Transformer architecture. It contextualizes the input by computing input-specific attention matrices. We find that this mechanism, while powerful and elegant, is not as…