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Despite the Transformer's dominance across machine learning, its architecture remains largely heuristic and lacks a unified theoretical foundation. We introduce Score-based Variational Flow (SVFlow), a continuous-time dynamical system for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Huadong Liao

Transformers are increasingly dominating multi-modal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering, achieving state-of-the-art results thanks to their ability to contextualize information using the self-attention and co-attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Hila Chefer , Shir Gur , Lior Wolf

Despite their central role in the success of foundational models and large-scale language modeling, the theoretical foundations governing the operation of Transformers remain only partially understood. Contemporary research has largely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Sagar Ghosh , Kushal Bose , Swagatam Das

Graph Transformers, which incorporate self-attention and positional encoding, have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various graph learning tasks. Despite their impressive performance, the complex non-convex interactions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Hongkang Li , Meng Wang , Tengfei Ma , Sijia Liu , Zaixi Zhang , Pin-Yu Chen

The Transformer architecture is widely used in natural language processing. Despite its success, the design principle of the Transformer remains elusive. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective towards understanding the architecture:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Yiping Lu , Zhuohan Li , Di He , Zhiqing Sun , Bin Dong , Tao Qin , Liwei Wang , Tie-Yan Liu

Transformers are a widespread and successful model architecture, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). The essential innovation of this architecture is the Attention Mechanism, which solves the problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Bernhard Bermeitinger , Tomas Hrycej , Massimo Pavone , Julianus Kath , Siegfried Handschuh

Transformer architecture has widespread applications, particularly in Natural Language Processing and computer vision. Recently Transformers have been employed in various aspects of time-series analysis. This tutorial provides an overview…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Sabeen Ahmed , Ian E. Nielsen , Aakash Tripathi , Shamoon Siddiqui , Ghulam Rasool , Ravi P. Ramachandran

We show that the standard discrete update rule of transformer layers can be naturally interpreted as a forward Euler discretization of a continuous dynamical system. Our Transformer Flow Approximation Theorem demonstrates that, under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Jacob Fein-Ashley

Existing research largely attributes the global sequence modeling capability of Transformers to the explicit computation of attention weights, a process that inherently incurs quadratic computational complexity. In this work, we offer a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Ruize He , Dongchen Han , Gao Huang

Models based on the Transformer architecture have achieved better accuracy than the ones based on competing architectures for a large set of tasks. A unique feature of the Transformer is its universal application of a self-attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nan Ding , Xinjie Fan , Zhenzhong Lan , Dale Schuurmans , Radu Soricut

We introduce the Momentum Transformer, an attention-based deep-learning architecture, which outperforms benchmark time-series momentum and mean-reversion trading strategies. Unlike state-of-the-art Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Kieran Wood , Sven Giegerich , Stephen Roberts , Stefan Zohren

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

The transformer is the most popular neural architecture for language modeling. The cornerstone of the transformer is its global attention mechanism, which lets the model aggregate information from all preceding tokens before generating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Jiaoda Li , Ryan Cotterell

In this paper we delve deep in the Transformer architecture by investigating two of its core components: self-attention and contextual embeddings. In particular, we study the identifiability of attention weights and token embeddings, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Gino Brunner , Yang Liu , Damián Pascual , Oliver Richter , Massimiliano Ciaramita , Roger Wattenhofer

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

Since its inception in "Attention Is All You Need", transformer architecture has led to revolutionary advancements in NLP. The attention layer within the transformer admits a sequence of input tokens $X$ and makes them interact through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Davoud Ataee Tarzanagh , Yingcong Li , Christos Thrampoulidis , Samet Oymak

Interpretability methods aim to understand the algorithm implemented by a trained model (e.g., a Transofmer) by examining various aspects of the model, such as the weight matrices or the attention patterns. In this work, through a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Kaiyue Wen , Yuchen Li , Bingbin Liu , Andrej Risteski

We present Laneformer, a conceptually simple yet powerful transformer-based architecture tailored for lane detection that is a long-standing research topic for visual perception in autonomous driving. The dominant paradigms rely on purely…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Jianhua Han , Xiajun Deng , Xinyue Cai , Zhen Yang , Hang Xu , Chunjing Xu , Xiaodan Liang

In this work, we present a generalized formulation of the Transformer algorithm by reinterpreting its core mechanisms within the framework of Path Integral formalism. In this perspective, the attention mechanism is recast as a process that…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-05-02 Won-Gi Paeng , Daesuk Kwon , Kyungwon Jeong , Honggyo Suh

The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yihe Dong , Lorenzo Noci , Mikhail Khodak , Mufan Li