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The extraction of useful deep features is important for many computer vision tasks. Deep features extracted from classification networks have proved to perform well in those tasks. To obtain features of greater usefulness, end-to-end…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Shota Horiguchi , Daiki Ikami , Kiyoharu Aizawa

State space models (SSMs) have emerged as a competitive alternative to transformers in various tasks. Their linear complexity and hidden-state recurrence make them particularly attractive for modeling long sequences, whereas attention…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Nyle Siddiqui , Rohit Gupta , Sirnam Swetha , Mubarak Shah

Sequence models lie at the heart of modern deep learning. However, rapid advancements have produced a diversity of seemingly unrelated architectures, such as Transformers and recurrent alternatives. In this paper, we introduce a unifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Ke Alexander Wang , Jiaxin Shi , Emily B. Fox

Many self-supervised speech models (S3Ms) have been introduced over the last few years, improving performance and data efficiency on various speech tasks. However, these empirical successes alone do not give a complete picture of what is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Ankita Pasad , Chung-Ming Chien , Shane Settle , Karen Livescu

The attention mechanism within the transformer architecture enables the model to weigh and combine tokens based on their relevance to the query. While self-attention has enjoyed major success, it notably treats all queries $q$ in the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Xuechen Zhang , Xiangyu Chang , Mingchen Li , Amit Roy-Chowdhury , Jiasi Chen , Samet Oymak

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Pavlo Vasylenko , Hugo Pitorro , André F. T. Martins , Marcos Treviso

Linear recurrent neural networks have emerged as efficient alternatives to the original Transformer's softmax attention mechanism, thanks to their highly parallelizable training and constant memory and computation requirements at inference.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Younes Bouhadjar , Maxime Fabre , Felix Schmidt , Emre Neftci

Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Etienne Boursier , Claire Boyer

Attention mechanism has gained great success in vision recognition. Many works are devoted to improving the effectiveness of attention mechanism, which finely design the structure of the attention operator. These works need lots of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-09-14 Shanshan Zhong , Wushao Wen , Jinghui Qin

Attention mechanisms have become a popular component in deep neural networks, yet there has been little examination of how different influencing factors and methods for computing attention from these factors affect performance. Toward a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-04-15 Xizhou Zhu , Dazhi Cheng , Zheng Zhang , Stephen Lin , Jifeng Dai

Attention mechanisms have been extensively employed in various applications, including time series modeling, owing to their capacity to capture intricate dependencies; however, their utility is often constrained by quadratic computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Mingtao Zhang , Guoli Yang , Zhanxing Zhu , Mengzhu Wang , Xiaoying Bai

Transformers are increasingly adopted for modeling and forecasting time-series, yet their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood from a dynamical systems perspective. In contrast to classical autoregressive and state-space models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Gregory Duthé , Nikolaos Evangelou , Wei Liu , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni Chatzi

State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the transformer architecture. Recent studies show that SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks, such as code retrieval, when trained under…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Jiali Wu , Abhinav Anand , Shweta Verma , Mira Mezini

In the post-deep learning era, the Transformer architecture has demonstrated its powerful performance across pre-trained big models and various downstream tasks. However, the enormous computational demands of this architecture have deterred…

Black-box neural network models are widely used in industry and science, yet are hard to understand and interpret. Recently, the attention mechanism was introduced, offering insights into the inner workings of neural language models. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Blaž Škrlj , Sašo Džeroski , Nada Lavrač , Matej Petkovič

While transformer models exhibit strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities, they often fail to generalize under simple distribution shifts. We analyze these failures and identify Softmax, the scoring function in the attention mechanism, as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omar Naim , Swarnadeep Bhar , Jérôme Bolte , Nicholas Asher

Linear attention has attracted interest as a computationally efficient approximation to softmax attention, especially for long sequences. Recent studies have explored distilling softmax attention in pre-trained Transformers into linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Naoki Nishikawa , Rei Higuchi , Taiji Suzuki

The self-attention mechanism distinguishes transformer-based large language models (LLMs) apart from convolutional and recurrent neural networks. Despite the performance improvement, achieving real-time LLM inference on silicon remains…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2024-11-18 Shiwei Liu , Guanchen Tao , Yifei Zou , Derek Chow , Zichen Fan , Kauna Lei , Bangfei Pan , Dennis Sylvester , Gregory Kielian , Mehdi Saligane

In this paper, we share our reflections and insights on understanding Transformer architectures through the lens of associative memory--a classic psychological concept inspired by human cognition. We start with the basics of associative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shu Zhong , Mingyu Xu , Tenglong Ao , Guang Shi

Attention mechanisms have recently demonstrated impressive performance on a range of NLP tasks, and attention scores are often used as a proxy for model explainability. However, there is a debate on whether attention weights can, in fact,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Bingyang Wen , K. P. Subbalakshmi , Fan Yang