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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…