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Transformer-based scientific foundation models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, but current architectures give deterministic outputs and provide limited support for calibrated predictive uncertainty. We propose Stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Akash Yadav , Taiwo A. Adebiyi , Ruda Zhang

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Transformer attention is typically implemented using softmax normalization, which enforces attention weights with unit sum normalization. While effective in many settings, this constraint can limit flexibility in controlling attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Jeongin Bae , Baeseong Park , Gunho Park , Minsub Kim , Joonhyung Lee , Junhee Yoo , Sunghyeon Woo , Jiwon Ryu , Se Jung Kwon , Dongsoo Lee

Attention mechanism is a central component of the transformer architecture which led to the phenomenal success of large language models. However, the theoretical principles underlying the attention mechanism are poorly understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Xuechen Zhang , Samet Oymak

We propose a slowly damped inertial primal-dual dynamical system controlled by a Tikhonov regularization term, where the inertial term is introduced only for the primal variable, for the linearly constrained convex optimization problem in a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-24 Ting-Ting Zhu , Rong Hu , Ya-Ping Fang

Sampling-based methods, e.g., Deep Ensembles and Bayesian Neural Nets have become promising approaches to improve the quality of uncertainty estimation and robust generalization. However, they suffer from a large model size and high latency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Ha Manh Bui , Anqi Liu

At the core of the popular Transformer architecture is the self-attention mechanism, which dynamically assigns softmax weights to each input token so that the model can focus on the most salient information. However, the softmax structure…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Fanqi Yan , Huy Nguyen , Pedram Akbarian , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

The attention module is the key component in Transformers. While the global attention mechanism offers high expressiveness, its excessive computational cost restricts its applicability in various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Dongchen Han , Tianzhu Ye , Yizeng Han , Zhuofan Xia , Siyuan Pan , Pengfei Wan , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

We study transformer language models, analyzing attention heads whose attention patterns are spread out, and whose attention scores depend weakly on content. We argue that the softmax denominators of these heads are stable when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Alex Gibson

Recently, many machine learning optimizers have been analysed considering them as the asymptotic limit of some differential equations when the step size goes to zero. In other words, the optimizers can be seen as a finite difference scheme…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-07-02 Bilel Bensaid , Gaël Poëtte , Rodolphe Turpault

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art results across a range of domains, but their quadratic attention mechanism poses significant challenges for long-sequence modelling. Recent efforts to design linear-time attention mechanisms have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Rares Dolga , Lucas Maystre , Marius Cobzarenco , David Barber

This paper investigates the dynamical properties of tokens in pre-trained Transformer models and explores their application to improving Transformers. To this end, we analyze the dynamical system governing the continuous-time limit of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Duy-Tung Pham , An The Nguyen , Viet-Hoang Tran , Nhan-Phu Chung , Xin T. Tong , Tan M. Nguyen , Thieu N. Vo

We propose a simple modification to the conventional attention mechanism applied by Transformers: Instead of quantifying pairwise query-key similarity with scaled dot-products, we quantify it with the logarithms of scaled dot-products of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Franz A. Heinsen

We introduce a new interpretation of the attention matrix as a discrete-time Markov chain. Our interpretation sheds light on common operations involving attention scores such as selection, summation, and averaging in a unified framework. It…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Yotam Erel , Olaf Dünkel , Rishabh Dabral , Vladislav Golyanik , Christian Theobalt , Amit H. Bermano

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

Attention based models such as Transformers involve pairwise interactions between data points, modeled with a learnable attention matrix. Importantly, this attention matrix is normalized with the SoftMax operator, which makes it row-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Michael E. Sander , Pierre Ablin , Mathieu Blondel , Gabriel Peyré

Multi-head attention enables transformer models to represent multiple attention patterns simultaneously. Empirically, head specialization emerges in distinct stages during training, while many heads remain redundant and learn similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 M. Sagitova , O. Duranthon , L. Zdeborová

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Attention mechanisms have been extensively employed in various applications, including time series modeling, owing to their capacity to capture intricate dependencies; however, their utility is often constrained by quadratic computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Mingtao Zhang , Guoli Yang , Zhanxing Zhu , Mengzhu Wang , Xiaoying Bai