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The expressive power of transformers over inputs of unbounded size can be studied through their ability to recognize classes of formal languages. In this paper, we establish exact characterizations of transformers with hard attention (in…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Andy Yang , David Chiang , Dana Angluin

Transformers in their common form are inherently limited to operate on whole token sequences rather than on one token at a time. Consequently, their use during online inference on time-series data entails considerable redundancy due to the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-06-28 Lukas Hedegaard , Arian Bakhtiarnia , Alexandros Iosifidis

Efficient Transformers have been developed for long sequence modeling, due to their subquadratic memory and time complexity. Sparse Transformer is a popular approach to improving the efficiency of Transformers by restricting self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Aosong Feng , Irene Li , Yuang Jiang , Rex Ying

To enhance reasoning capabilities, previous works have explored incorporating special-purpose tokens into the training process. These strategies strengthen the learning mechanism of transformer-based large language models (LLMs). Building…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Eunki Kim , Sangryul Kim , James Thorne

As we show in this paper, the prediction for output token $n+1$ of Transformer architectures without one of the mechanisms of positional encodings and causal attention is invariant to permutations of input tokens $1, 2, ..., n-1$. Usually,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Chunsheng Zuo , Michael Guerzhoy

Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zhiyuan Li , Hong Liu , Denny Zhou , Tengyu Ma

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in understanding tasks but continue to struggle with long-context comprehension, particularly with content located in the middle of extensive inputs. This limitation, known as the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 James Begin , Namit Agrawal , Eshan Singh , Yicheng Fu , Sean O'Brien , Vasu Sharma , Kevin Zhu

Since its introduction, the transformer has shifted the development trajectory away from traditional models (e.g., RNN, MLP) in time series forecasting, which is attributed to its ability to capture global dependencies within temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Xiwen Chen , Peijie Qiu , Wenhui Zhu , Huayu Li , Hao Wang , Aristeidis Sotiras , Yalin Wang , Abolfazl Razi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal in advancing natural language processing but often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to inefficient attention distributions. In this paper, we explore the effect of increased computed tokens…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Bingli Liao , Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas

Holistic scene understanding includes semantic segmentation, surface normal estimation, object boundary detection, depth estimation, etc. The key aspect of this problem is to learn representation effectively, as each subtask builds upon not…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Shuo Wang , Jing Li , Zibo Zhao , Dongze Lian , Binbin Huang , Xiaomei Wang , Zhengxin Li , Shenghua Gao

As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contributes to inference latency and operational cost. Recent studies suggest that many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Richmond Sin Jing Xuan , Rishabh Bhardwaj , Soujanya Poria

Fine-tuning provides an effective means to specialize pre-trained models for various downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning often incurs high memory overhead, especially for large transformer-based models, such as LLMs. While existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Antoine Simoulin , Namyong Park , Xiaoyi Liu , Grey Yang

The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Álvaro Rodríguez Abella , João Pedro Silvestre , Paulo Tabuada

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable success across vision, language, and video. Yet, increasing task complexity has led to larger models and more tokens, raising the quadratic cost of self-attention and the overhead of GPU memory…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Joonmyung Choi , Sanghyeok Lee , Byungoh Ko , Eunseo Kim , Jihyung Kil , Hyunwoo J. Kim

We prove that any Turing machine running on inputs of arbitrary length can be simulated by a constant bit-size transformer, as long as the context window is sufficiently long. This improves previous works, which require scaling up either…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Qian Li , Yuyi Wang

Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding and describing visual content, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various vision-language tasks. However, these models often generate…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Kazi Hasan Ibn Arif , Sajib Acharjee Dip , Khizar Hussain , Lang Zhang , Chris Thomas

We investigate the mechanisms that arise when transformers are trained to solve arithmetic on sequences where tokens are variables whose meaning is determined only through their interactions in-context. While prior work has studied…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Eric Todd , Jannik Brinkmann , Rohit Gandikota , David Bau

Previous research has explored the computational expressivity of Transformer models in simulating Boolean circuits or Turing machines. However, the learnability of these simulators from observational data has remained an open question. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Morris Yau , Ekin Akyürek , Jiayuan Mao , Joshua B. Tenenbaum , Stefanie Jegelka , Jacob Andreas

Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Mehryar Mohri

Transformer models have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of applications. Though forming the foundation of Transformer models, the dot-product attention does not scale well to long-context data since its time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Yongchang Hao , Mengyao Zhai , Hossein Hajimirsadeghi , Sepidehsadat Hosseini , Frederick Tung