Related papers: Critical attention scaling in long-context transfo…
We study the long-context limit of softmax self-attention with a fixed query and a random context of $n$ i.i.d. keys on the sphere, viewing the inverse temperature $\beta_n$ as the scaling parameter that decides whether attention…
We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…
Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable success in extensive tasks primarily attributed to self-attention mechanism, which requires a token to consider all preceding tokens as its context to compute…
Efficient attention mechanisms enable long-context transformers but often miss globally important tokens, degrading modeling quality. We introduce a pre-scoring framework that assigns a query-independent global importance prior to keys…
The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) is significantly sensitive to the contextual position of information in the input. To investigate the mechanism behind this positional bias, our extensive experiments reveal a consistent…
Self-attention is the key mechanism of transformers, which are the essential building blocks of modern foundation models. Recent studies have shown that pure self-attention suffers from an increasing degree of rank collapse as depth…
Transformer-based architectures have become the prevailing backbone of large language models. However, the quadratic time and memory complexity of self-attention remains a fundamental obstacle to efficient long-context modeling. To address…
Attention based Transformer architecture has enabled significant advances in the field of natural language processing. In addition to new pre-training techniques, recent improvements crucially rely on working with a relatively larger…
Extending the functionality of the Transformer model to accommodate longer sequence lengths has become a critical challenge. This extension is crucial not only for improving tasks such as language translation and long-context processing but…
Large language models have shown remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks, owing to their exceptional capabilities in context modeling. The most commonly used method of context modeling is full self-attention, as seen in…
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks by capturing long-range dependencies through self-attention mechanisms. However, long-context modeling faces significant computational inefficiencies…
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…
Despite scale driving substantial recent advancements in machine learning, reinforcement learning (RL) methods still primarily use small value functions. Naively scaling value functions -- including with a transformer architecture, which is…
This paper investigates the limitations of transformers for entity-tracking tasks in large language models. We identify a theoretical constraint, showing that transformers require at least $\log_2 (n+1)$ layers to handle entity tracking…
Identifying words that impact a task's performance more than others is a challenge in natural language processing. Transformers models have recently addressed this issue by incorporating an attention mechanism that assigns greater attention…
Transformer-based models have emerged as one of the most widely used architectures for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation. The size of the state-of-the-art models has increased steadily reaching…
The scaling trend in Large Language Models (LLMs) has prioritized increasing the maximum context window to facilitate complex, long-form reasoning and document analysis. However, managing this expanded context introduces severe…
The Transformer architecture, a cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), has achieved extraordinary success in sequence modeling, primarily due to its attention mechanism. However, despite its power, the standard attention…
The quadratic cost of scaled dot-product attention is a central obstacle to scaling autoregressive language models to long contexts. Linear-time attention and State Space Models (SSMs) provide scalable alternatives but are typically…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown promising accuracy improvements on complex problem-solving tasks. While these models have attained high accuracy by leveraging additional computation at test time, they need to generate long…