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Related papers: Leaner Transformers: More Heads, Less Depth

200 papers

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Yaniv Leviathan , Matan Kalman , Yossi Matias

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

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

Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Prakhar Thapak , Prodip Hore

The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Hongyu Hè , Marko Kabic

Multi-head attention layers, as used in the Transformer neural sequence model, are a powerful alternative to RNNs for moving information across and between sequences. While training these layers is generally fast and simple, due to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Noam Shazeer

Determining an appropriate number of attention heads on one hand and the number of transformer-encoders, on the other hand, is an important choice for Computer Vision (CV) tasks using the Transformer architecture. Computing experiments…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Tomas Hrycej , Bernhard Bermeitinger , Siegfried Handschuh

Transformers have become one of the dominant architectures in deep learning, particularly as a powerful alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in computer vision. However, Transformer training and inference in previous works…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Zizheng Pan , Bohan Zhuang , Haoyu He , Jing Liu , Jianfei Cai

Transformers have transformed modern machine learning, driving breakthroughs in computer vision, natural language processing, and robotics. At the core of their success lies the attention mechanism, which enables the modeling of global…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Hemanth Saratchandran , Simon Lucey

Since hardware resources are limited, the objective of training deep learning models is typically to maximize accuracy subject to the time and memory constraints of training and inference. We study the impact of model size in this setting,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-24 Zhuohan Li , Eric Wallace , Sheng Shen , Kevin Lin , Kurt Keutzer , Dan Klein , Joseph E. Gonzalez

Learning algorithms become more powerful, often at the cost of increased complexity. In response, the demand for algorithms to be transparent is growing. In NLP tasks, attention distributions learned by attention-based deep learning models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-07-09 Joris Baan , Maartje ter Hoeve , Marlies van der Wees , Anne Schuth , Maarten de Rijke

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

Despite that going deep has proven successful in many neural architectures, the existing graph transformers are relatively shallow. In this work, we explore whether more layers are beneficial to graph transformers, and find that current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Haiteng Zhao , Shuming Ma , Dongdong Zhang , Zhi-Hong Deng , Furu Wei

Astounding results from Transformer models on natural language tasks have intrigued the vision community to study their application to computer vision problems. Among their salient benefits, Transformers enable modeling long dependencies…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-20 Salman Khan , Muzammal Naseer , Munawar Hayat , Syed Waqas Zamir , Fahad Shahbaz Khan , Mubarak Shah

Transformers have dominated sequence processing tasks for the past seven years -- most notably language modeling. However, the inherent quadratic complexity of their attention mechanism remains a significant bottleneck as context length…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Alexander M. Fichtl , Jeremias Bohn , Josefin Kelber , Edoardo Mosca , Georg Groh

The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-28 Raymond Li , Wen Xiao , Linzi Xing , Lanjun Wang , Gabriel Murray , Giuseppe Carenini

Transformers have become the go-to architecture for language and vision tasks, yet their theoretical properties, especially memorization capacity, remain elusive. This paper investigates the memorization abilities of multi-head attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Sadegh Mahdavi , Renjie Liao , Christos Thrampoulidis

This paper studies the relative importance of attention heads in Transformer-based models to aid their interpretability in cross-lingual and multi-lingual tasks. Prior research has found that only a few attention heads are important in each…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-20 Weicheng Ma , Kai Zhang , Renze Lou , Lili Wang , Soroush Vosoughi