Related papers: Decomposing Attention To Find Context-Sensitive Ne…

We take a deep look into the behavior of self-attention heads in the transformer architecture. In light of recent work discouraging the use of attention distributions for explaining a model's behavior, we show that attention distributions…

We characterize the pre-softmax attention matrix $\mathbf{QK^\top}$ in transformers as an associative memory matrix encoding pairwise associations between input features. By decomposing this matrix into its symmetric and skew-symmetric…

Softmax attention defines an interaction through $d_h$ head dimensions, but not all dimensions carry equal weight once real text passes through. We decompose the attention logit field into a learned component and a generated component and…

Recent work has shown that the encoder-decoder attention mechanisms in neural machine translation (NMT) are different from the word alignment in statistical machine translation. In this paper, we focus on analyzing encoder-decoder attention…

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed…

Reinforcement-learning-based post-training has become a key approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but its token-level learning signals remain poorly understood. This work studies their heterogeneity through…

As the quality of large language models has improved, there has been increased interest in using them to model non-linguistic tokens. For example, the Decision Transformer recasts agentic decision making as a sequence modeling problem,…

We introduce a cumulant-expansion framework for quantifying how large language models (LLMs) internalize higher-order statistical structure during next-token prediction. By treating the softmax entropy of each layer's logit distribution as…

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

In dense retrieval, deep encoders provide embeddings for both inputs and targets, and the softmax function is used to parameterize a distribution over a large number of candidate targets (e.g., textual passages for information retrieval).…

Softmax self-attention often assigns disproportionate weight to semantically uninformative tokens such as special tokens and punctuation, a phenomenon known as attention noise. While recent methods like Cog Attention and the Differential…

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Attention, specifically scaled dot-product attention, has proven effective for natural language, but it does not have a mechanism for handling hierarchical patterns of arbitrary nesting depth, which limits its ability to recognize certain…

We introduce a new discrete-time attention model, termed the localmax dynamics, which interpolates between the classic softmax dynamics and the hardmax dynamics, where only the tokens that maximize the influence toward a given token have a…

Text-to-image diffusion models excel at translating language prompts into photorealistic images by implicitly grounding textual concepts through their cross-modal attention mechanisms. Recent multi-modal diffusion transformers extend this…

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable empirical success in modeling contextual relations, yet a clear understanding of their expressive power is still lacking. In this work, we introduce a measure-theoretic framework in which…

Transformer-based models have been achieving state-of-the-art results in several fields of Natural Language Processing. However, its direct application to speech tasks is not trivial. The nature of this sequences carries problems such as…

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…

Evaluating softmax attention over a fixed long context requires reading every cached key-value pair for each new query token. For a given context (a book, a manual, a legal corpus) the attention output is a deterministic function of the…

Despite being the current de-facto models in most NLP tasks, transformers are often limited to short sequences due to their quadratic attention complexity on the number of tokens. Several attempts to address this issue were studied, either…