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The architecture of Transformer is based entirely on self-attention, and has been shown to outperform models that employ recurrence on sequence transduction tasks such as machine translation. The superior performance of Transformer has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-29 Vikas K. Garg , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Hsiang-Fu Yu

Transformer-based language models have achieved impressive success in various natural language processing tasks due to their ability to capture complex dependencies and contextual information using self-attention mechanisms. However, they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Kaushik Roy , Yuxin Zi , Vignesh Narayanan , Manas Gaur , Amit Sheth

Transformer based models have shown remarkable capabilities in sequence learning across a wide range of tasks, often performing well on specific task by leveraging input-output examples. Despite their empirical success, a comprehensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Yifan Hao , Chenlu Ye , Chi Han , Tong Zhang

We propose a probabilistic interpretation of transformers as unrolled inference steps assuming a probabilistic Laplacian Eigenmaps model from the ProbDR framework. Our derivation shows that at initialisation, transformers perform "linear"…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Aditya Ravuri , Neil D. Lawrence

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Eshaan Nichani , Alex Damian , Jason D. Lee

Attention layers -- which map a sequence of inputs to a sequence of outputs -- are core building blocks of the Transformer architecture which has achieved significant breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. This paper presents a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Hengyu Fu , Tianyu Guo , Yu Bai , Song Mei

The transformer neural network architecture allows for autoregressive sequence-to-sequence modeling through the use of attention layers. It was originally created with the application of machine translation but has revolutionized natural…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Abhi Kamboj

Transformer-based language models significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in many linguistic tasks. As this revolution continues, the ability to explain model predictions has become a major area of interest for the NLP community. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Oren Barkan , Edan Hauon , Avi Caciularu , Ori Katz , Itzik Malkiel , Omri Armstrong , Noam Koenigstein

Transformers have revolutionized deep learning in numerous fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and audio processing. Their strength lies in their attention mechanism, which allows for the discovering of complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Uladzislau Yorsh , Martin Holeňa , Ondřej Bojar , David Herel

An extension of Transformers is proposed that enables explicit relational reasoning through a novel module called the Abstractor. At the core of the Abstractor is a variant of attention called relational cross-attention. The approach is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Awni Altabaa , Taylor Webb , Jonathan Cohen , John Lafferty

Transformers have achieved state-of-the-art performance in numerous tasks. In this paper, we propose a continuous-time formulation of transformers. Specifically, we consider a dynamical system whose governing equation is parametrized by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Kelvin Kan , Xingjian Li , Stanley Osher

Recently, the Transformer model that is based solely on attention mechanisms, has advanced the state-of-the-art on various machine translation tasks. However, recent studies reveal that the lack of recurrence hinders its further improvement…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-04-08 Jie Hao , Xing Wang , Baosong Yang , Longyue Wang , Jinfeng Zhang , Zhaopeng Tu

Transformer-based architectures achieved breakthrough performance in natural language processing and computer vision, yet they remain inferior to simpler linear baselines in multivariate long-term forecasting. To better understand this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Romain Ilbert , Ambroise Odonnat , Vasilii Feofanov , Aladin Virmaux , Giuseppe Paolo , Themis Palpanas , Ievgen Redko

Recurrent neural networks are effective models to process sequences. However, they are unable to learn long-term dependencies because of their inherent sequential nature. As a solution, Vaswani et al. introduced the Transformer, a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-28 Quentin Fournier , Gaétan Marceau Caron , Daniel Aloise

Transformer-based architectures are the most used architectures in many deep learning fields like Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision or Speech processing. It may encourage the direct use of Transformers in the constrained tasks,…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-29 Youness Dkhissi , Valentin Vielzeuf , Elys Allesiardo , Anthony Larcher

Self-attention has emerged as a vital component of state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence models for natural language processing in recent years, brought to the forefront by pre-trained bi-directional Transformer models. Its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Hyoungwook Nam , Seung Byum Seo , Vikram Sharma Mailthody , Noor Michael , Lan Li

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

Standard Transformers excel at semantic modeling but struggle with rigid sequential logic and state tracking. Theoretical work establishes that self-attention is limited to $\AC^0$ (under hard attention) or $\TC^0$ (under soft attention),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Mehryar Mohri

This work presents an analysis of the effectiveness of using standard shallow feed-forward networks to mimic the behavior of the attention mechanism in the original Transformer model, a state-of-the-art architecture for sequence-to-sequence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Vukasin Bozic , Danilo Dordevic , Daniele Coppola , Joseph Thommes , Sidak Pal Singh