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Impressive performance of Transformer has been attributed to self-attention, where dependencies between entire input in a sequence are considered at every position. In this work, we reform the neural $n$-gram model, which focuses on only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Mengsay Loem , Sho Takase , Masahiro Kaneko , Naoaki Okazaki

Transformer is a powerful architecture that achieves superior performance on various sequence learning tasks, including neural machine translation, language understanding, and sequence prediction. At the core of the Transformer is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Yao-Hung Hubert Tsai , Shaojie Bai , Makoto Yamada , Louis-Philippe Morency , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

Attention layers, as commonly used in transformers, form the backbone of modern deep learning, yet there is no mathematical description of their benefits and deficiencies as compared with other architectures. In this work we establish both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Clayton Sanford , Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

Multi-head self-attention is a key component of the Transformer, a state-of-the-art architecture for neural machine translation. In this work we evaluate the contribution made by individual attention heads in the encoder to the overall…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Elena Voita , David Talbot , Fedor Moiseev , Rico Sennrich , Ivan Titov

Transformers have been proven a successful model for a variety of tasks in sequence modeling. However, computing the attention matrix, which is their key component, has quadratic complexity with respect to the sequence length, thus making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Apoorv Vyas , Angelos Katharopoulos , François Fleuret

We study the capabilities of the transformer architecture with varying depth. Specifically, we designed a novel set of sequence learning tasks to systematically evaluate and comprehend how the depth of transformer affects its ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Xingwu Chen , Difan Zou

Transformers have achieved success in both language and vision domains. However, it is prohibitively expensive to scale them to long sequences such as long documents or high-resolution images, because self-attention mechanism has quadratic…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Chen Zhu , Wei Ping , Chaowei Xiao , Mohammad Shoeybi , Tom Goldstein , Anima Anandkumar , Bryan Catanzaro

Ever since their conception, Transformers have taken over traditional sequence models in many tasks, such as NLP, image classification, and video/audio processing, for their fast training and superior performance. Much of the merit is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Hongyu Hè , Marko Kabic

The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Dongchen Han , Tianyu Li , Ziyi Wang , Gao Huang

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Prakhar Thapak , Prodip Hore

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

Understanding the transformer architecture and its workings is essential for machine learning (ML) engineers. However, truly understanding the transformer architecture can be demanding, even if you have a solid background in machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Joni-Kristian Kämäräinen

Despite the widespread adoption of Transformer models for NLP tasks, the expressive power of these models is not well-understood. In this paper, we establish that Transformer models are universal approximators of continuous permutation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Chulhee Yun , Srinadh Bhojanapalli , Ankit Singh Rawat , Sashank J. Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar

Attention matrices are fundamental to transformer research, supporting a broad range of applications including interpretability, visualization, manipulation, and distillation. Yet, most existing analyses focus on individual attention heads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ido Andrew Atad , Itamar Zimerman , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

The computational complexity of the self-attention mechanism in popular transformer architectures poses significant challenges for training and inference, and becomes the bottleneck for long inputs. Is it possible to significantly reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Yingyu Liang , Zhizhou Sha , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song , Yufa Zhou

Transformer models have been widely adopted in various domains over the last years, and especially large language models have advanced the field of AI significantly. Due to their size, the capability of these networks has increased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Yelysei Bondarenko , Markus Nagel , Tijmen Blankevoort

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari