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Related papers: Transformers Are Universally Consistent

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Transformer is a deep neural network that employs a self-attention mechanism to comprehend the contextual relationships within sequential data. Unlike conventional neural networks or updated versions of Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Saidul Islam , Hanae Elmekki , Ahmed Elsebai , Jamal Bentahar , Najat Drawel , Gaith Rjoub , Witold Pedrycz

Transformers flexibly operate over sets of real-valued vectors representing task-specific entities and their attributes, where each vector might encode one word-piece token and its position in a sequence, or some piece of information that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-14 Cameron Diao , Ricky Loynd

Transformer architectures are typically described in algorithmic and statistical terms, leaving their internal mechanics without a familiar structural language for researchers trained in physical theories. To bridge this gap, we develop a…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-03-18 Po-Hao Chang

The Transformer architecture has become a cornerstone of modern artificial intelligence, but its core self-attention mechanism suffers from a complexity bottleneck that scales quadratically with sequence length, severely limiting its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Zhongpan Tang

Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have displayed remarkable creative prowess and emergence capabilities. Existing empirical studies have revealed a strong connection between these LLMs' impressive emergence abilities and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki , Qingfu Zhang , Hau-San Wong

Understanding the locus of semantic representation in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for interpretability and architectural innovation. The dominant paradigm posits that trainable input embeddings serve as foundational "meaning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 A. Bochkov

In this paper, we aim to build the global convergence theory of encoder-only shallow Transformers under a realistic setting from the perspective of architectures, initialization, and scaling under a finite width regime. The difficulty lies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Yongtao Wu , Fanghui Liu , Grigorios G Chrysos , Volkan Cevher

Linear attention methods offer Transformers $O(N)$ complexity but typically underperform standard softmax attention. We identify two fundamental limitations affecting these approaches: the restriction to convex combinations that only…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Jiecheng Lu , Xu Han , Yan Sun , Viresh Pati , Yubin Kim , Siddhartha Somani , Shihao Yang

Time-series data in real-world medical settings typically exhibit long-range dependencies and are observed at non-uniform intervals. In such contexts, traditional sequence-based recurrent models struggle. To overcome this, researchers…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-18 Fernando Moreno-Pino , Álvaro Arroyo , Harrison Waldon , Xiaowen Dong , Álvaro Cartea

We present a geometric framework for understanding Transformer-based language models, drawing an explicit analogy to General Relativity. Queries and keys induce an effective metric on representation space, and attention acts as a discrete…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Riccardo Di Sipio , Jairo Diaz-Rodriguez , Luis Serrano

We present a generalization of Transformers to any-order permutation invariant data (sets, graphs, and hypergraphs). We begin by observing that Transformers generalize DeepSets, or first-order (set-input) permutation invariant MLPs. Then,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Jinwoo Kim , Saeyoon Oh , Seunghoon Hong

Transformers excel at discovering patterns in sequential data, yet their fundamental limitations and learning mechanisms remain crucial topics of investigation. In this paper, we study the ability of Transformers to learn pseudo-random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-10 Tao Tao , Darshil Doshi , Dayal Singh Kalra , Tianyu He , Maissam Barkeshli

Recently, there has been a surge of Transformer-based solutions for the long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) task. Despite the growing performance over the past few years, we question the validity of this line of research in this work.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Ailing Zeng , Muxi Chen , Lei Zhang , Qiang Xu

Despite their ubiquity in core AI fields like natural language processing, the mechanics of deep attention-based neural networks like the Transformer model are not fully understood. In this article, we present a new perspective towards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Matthew A. Wright , Joseph E. Gonzalez

We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Mingze Wang , Weinan E

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

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

Existing analyses of the expressive capacity of Transformer models have required excessively deep layers for data memorization, leading to a discrepancy with the Transformers actually used in practice. This is primarily due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Tokio Kajitsuka , Issei Sato

Transformers have supplanted recurrent models in a large number of NLP tasks. However, the differences in their abilities to model different syntactic properties remain largely unknown. Past works suggest that LSTMs generalize very well on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Satwik Bhattamishra , Kabir Ahuja , Navin Goyal

Previous work on the learnability of transformers \textemdash\ focused primarily on examining their ability to approximate specific algorithmic patterns through training \textemdash\ has largely been data-driven, offering only probabilistic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Debanjan Dutta , Anish Chakrabarty , Faizanuddin Ansari , Swagatam Das