Related papers: Post-Norm can Resharpen Attention
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…
The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…
Normalization techniques are crucial for enhancing Transformer models' performance and stability in time series analysis tasks, yet traditional methods like batch and layer normalization often lead to issues such as token shift, attention…
Generalizing to longer sentences is important for recent Transformer-based language models. Besides algorithms manipulating explicit position features, the success of Transformers without position encodings (NoPE) provides a new way to…
With the attention mechanism, transformers achieve significant empirical successes. Despite the intuitive understanding that transformers perform relational inference over long sequences to produce desirable representations, we lack a…
We study the problem of length generalization (LG) in transformers: the ability of a model trained on shorter sequences to maintain performance when evaluated on much longer, previously unseen inputs. Prior work by Huang et al. (2025)…
Large language models display remarkable capabilities in logical and mathematical reasoning, allowing them to solve complex tasks. Interestingly, these abilities emerge in networks trained on the simple task of next-token prediction. In…
Neural networks are surprisingly good at interpolating and perform remarkably well when the training set examples resemble those in the test set. However, they are often unable to extrapolate patterns beyond the seen data, even when the…
Can transformers learn to perform algorithmic tasks reliably across previously unseen input/output domains? While pre-trained language models show solid accuracy on benchmarks incorporating algorithmic reasoning, assessing the reliability…
Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…
Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized…
The successful training of deep neural networks requires addressing challenges such as overfitting, numerical instabilities leading to divergence, and increasing variance in the residual stream. A common solution is to apply regularization…
In this paper we present a deeper analysis than has previously been carried out of a selective attention problem, and the evolution of continuous-time recurrent neural networks to solve it. We show that the task has a rich structure, and…
We explore different ways to utilize position-based cross-attention in seq2seq networks to enable length generalization in algorithmic tasks. We show that a simple approach of interpolating the original and reversed encoded representations…
Transformer-based architectures traditionally employ softmax to compute attention weights, which produces dense distributions over all tokens in a sequence. While effective in many settings, this density has been shown to be detrimental for…
Transformers allow attention between all pairs of tokens, but there is reason to believe that most of these connections - and their quadratic time and memory - may not be necessary. But which ones? We evaluate the impact of sparsification…
Agents trained with deep reinforcement learning algorithms are capable of performing highly complex tasks including locomotion in continuous environments. We investigate transferring the learning acquired in one task to a set of previously…
Recurrent sequence generators conditioned on input data through an attention mechanism have recently shown very good performance on a range of tasks in- cluding machine translation, handwriting synthesis and image caption gen- eration. We…
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…
Despite their power, Transformers face challenges with long sequences due to the quadratic complexity of self-attention. To address this limitation, methods like $k$-Nearest-Neighbor ($k$NN) attention have been introduced [Roy, Saffar,…