Related papers: Decomposing Attention To Find Context-Sensitive Ne…
We prove that with linear transformations, both (i) two-layer self-attention and (ii) one-layer self-attention followed by a softmax function are universal approximators for continuous sequence-to-sequence functions on compact domains. Our…
While linear-complexity attention mechanisms offer a promising alternative to Softmax attention for overcoming the quadratic bottleneck, training such models from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. Inheriting weights from pretrained…
Task specific fine-tuning of a pre-trained neural language model using a custom softmax output layer is the de facto approach of late when dealing with document classification problems. This technique is not adequate when labeled examples…
Transformers, known for their attention mechanisms, have proven highly effective in focusing on critical elements within complex data. This feature can effectively be used to address the time-varying channels in wireless communication…
As context windows in large language models continue to expand, it is essential to characterize how attention behaves at extreme sequence lengths. We introduce token-sample complexity: the rate at which attention computed on $n$ tokens…
Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…
Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in…
This document provides a brief introduction to the attention mechanism used in modern language models based on the Transformer architecture. We first illustrate how text is encoded as vectors and how the attention mechanism processes these…
Neural attention, especially the self-attention made popular by the Transformer, has become the workhorse of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) models. Very recent work suggests that the self-attention in the Transformer…
Attention mechanism, including global attention and local attention, plays a key role in neural machine translation (NMT). Global attention attends to all source words for word prediction. In comparison, local attention selectively looks at…
In text generation, a large language model (LM) makes a choice of each new word based only on the former selection of its context using the softmax function. Nevertheless, the link statistics information of concurrent words based on a…
Neural attention has become central to many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing and related domains. Attention networks are an easy-to-train and effective method for softly simulating alignment; however, the approach does…
Constituting highly informative network embeddings is an important tool for network analysis. It encodes network topology, along with other useful side information, into low-dimensional node-based feature representations that can be…
Attention layers are an integral part of modern end-to-end automatic speech recognition systems, for instance as part of the Transformer or Conformer architecture. Attention is typically multi-headed, where each head has an independent set…
Advances in language modeling have led to the development of deep attention-based models that are performant across a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) problems. These language models are typified by a pre-training process…
Language models (LMs) are often used as zero-shot or few-shot classifiers by scoring label words, but they remain fragile to adversarial prompts. Prior work typically optimizes task- or model-specific triggers, making results difficult to…
This study investigates the ability of perceptron-type neurons in language models to perform intra-neuronal attention; that is, to identify different homogeneous categorical segments within the synthetic thought category they encode, based…
This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…
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…
We analyze how large language models (LLMs) represent out-of-context words, investigating their reliance on the given context to capture their semantics. Our likelihood-guided text perturbations reveal a correlation between token likelihood…