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Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Zheng-An Chen , Tao Luo

Transformers have achieved great success in recent years. Interestingly, transformers have shown particularly strong in-context learning capability -- even without fine-tuning, they are still able to solve unseen tasks well purely based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Zihao Li , Yuan Cao , Cheng Gao , Yihan He , Han Liu , Jason M. Klusowski , Jianqing Fan , Mengdi Wang

Transformers update token representations through multi-head attention and residual connections as $X \leftarrow X + \sum_{i} P^{(i)}XW_{V_i}W_{o_i}$, where $P^{(i)}$ is the softmax attention matrix in head $i$. We propose replacing a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Yuchong Zhang , Vardan Papyan

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

The Laplacian representation recently gains increasing attention for reinforcement learning as it provides succinct and informative representation for states, by taking the eigenvectors of the Laplacian matrix of the state-transition graph…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Kaixin Wang , Kuangqi Zhou , Qixin Zhang , Jie Shao , Bryan Hooi , Jiashi Feng

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

We train a linear attention transformer on millions of masked-block matrix completion tasks: each prompt is masked low-rank matrix whose missing block may be (i) a scalar prediction target or (ii) an unseen kernel slice of Nystr\"om…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Patrick Lutz , Aditya Gangrade , Hadi Daneshmand , Venkatesh Saligrama

Recent research has demonstrated that transformers, particularly linear attention models, implicitly execute gradient-descent-like algorithms on data provided in-context during their forward inference step. However, their capability in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Max Vladymyrov , Johannes von Oswald , Mark Sandler , Rong Ge

Understanding Transformer-based models has attracted significant attention, as they lie at the heart of recent technological advances across machine learning. While most interpretability methods rely on running models over inputs, recent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guy Dar , Mor Geva , Ankit Gupta , Jonathan Berant

We argue that Transformers are essentially graph-to-graph models, with sequences just being a special case. Attention weights are functionally equivalent to graph edges. Our Graph-to-Graph Transformer architecture makes this ability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-30 James Henderson , Alireza Mohammadshahi , Andrei C. Coman , Lesly Miculicich

The Transformer, with its scaled dot-product attention mechanism, has become a foundational architecture in modern AI. However, this mechanism is computationally intensive and incurs substantial energy costs. We propose a new Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Xin Gao , Xingming Xu , Shirin Amiraslani , Hong Xu

Transformers are neural networks that revolutionized natural language processing and machine learning. They process sequences of inputs, like words, using a mechanism called self-attention, which is trained via masked language modeling…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-04-17 Riccardo Rende , Federica Gerace , Alessandro Laio , Sebastian Goldt

This research endeavors to offer insights into unlocking the further potential of transformer-based architectures. One of the primary motivations is to offer a geometric interpretation for the attention mechanism in transformers. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhongping Ji

Transformer based language models exhibit intelligent behaviors such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, acquiring knowledge, reasoning, planning, reflecting and using tools. This paper explores how their underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Sumeet S. Singh

With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yufeng Zhang , Boyi Liu , Qi Cai , Lingxiao Wang , Zhaoran Wang

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang

The Transformer is a highly successful deep learning model that has revolutionised the world of artificial neural networks, first in natural language processing and later in computer vision. This model is based on the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Ughi , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Matteucci

Transformers have emerged as a powerful neural network architecture capable of tackling a wide range of learning tasks. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of their ability to automatically extract structure from data in an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Pierre Marion , Claire Boyer

Central to the success of Transformers is the attention block, which effectively models global dependencies among input tokens associated to a dataset. However, we theoretically demonstrate that standard attention mechanisms in transformers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Hemanth Saratchandran

Recurrent Neural Networks were, until recently, one of the best ways to capture the timely dependencies in sequences. However, with the introduction of the Transformer, it has been proven that an architecture with only attention-mechanisms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-19 Radostin Cholakov , Todor Kolev