Related papers: Deconstructing Attention: Investigating Design Pri…
Attention-based models are successful when trained on large amounts of data. In this paper, we demonstrate that even in the low-resource scenario, attention can be learned effectively. To this end, we start with discrete human-annotated…
Neural attention has become central to many state-of-the-art models in natural language processing and related domains. Attention networks are an easy-to-train and effective method for softly simulating alignment; however, the approach does…
In order to successfully perform tasks specified by natural language instructions, an artificial agent operating in a visual world needs to map words, concepts, and actions from the instruction to visual elements in its environment. This…
When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to…
Encoder-decoder networks with attention have proven to be a powerful way to solve many sequence-to-sequence tasks. In these networks, attention aligns encoder and decoder states and is often used for visualizing network behavior. However,…
The reward model (RM), as the core component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models (LLMs), responsible for providing reward signals to generated responses. However, the mainstream discriminative…
Key-Value (KV) cache memory and bandwidth increasingly dominate large language model inference cost in long-context and long-generation regimes. Architectures such as multi-head latent attention (MLA) and hybrid sliding-window attention…
Transformer-based pre-training techniques of text and layout have proven effective in a number of document understanding tasks. Despite this success, multimodal pre-training models suffer from very high computational and memory costs.…
Attention mechanisms have raised significant interest in the research community, since they promise significant improvements in the performance of neural network architectures. However, in any specific problem, we still lack a principled…
Neural language models are becoming the prevailing methodology for the tasks of query answering, text classification, disambiguation, completion and translation. Commonly comprised of hundreds of millions of parameters, these neural network…
Attention regulates information transfer between tokens. For this, query and key vectors are compared, typically in terms of a scalar product, $\mathbf{Q}^T\mathbf{K}$, together with a subsequent softmax normalization. In geometric terms,…
Transformers have reshaped machine learning by utilizing attention mechanisms to capture complex patterns in large datasets, leading to significant improvements in performance. This success has contributed to the belief that "bigger means…
Recent work has shown that the encoder-decoder attention mechanisms in neural machine translation (NMT) are different from the word alignment in statistical machine translation. In this paper, we focus on analyzing encoder-decoder attention…
The vanilla self-attention mechanism in Transformers can be viewed as a two-layer fast-weight MLP, whose weights are dynamically induced by inputs and whose hidden dimension is equal to the sequence length $N$. As the context extends, the…
The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…
Large multimodal models (LMMs) "see" images by leveraging the attention mechanism between text and visual tokens in the transformer decoder. Ideally, these models should focus on key visual information relevant to the text token. However,…
We conduct a systematic study of the approximation properties of Transformer for sequence modeling with long, sparse and complicated memory. We investigate the mechanisms through which different components of Transformer, such as the…
Transformers have recently shown superior performances on various vision tasks. The large, sometimes even global, receptive field endows Transformer models with higher representation power over their CNN counterparts. Nevertheless, simply…
Transformer networks have lead to important progress in language modeling and machine translation. These models include two consecutive modules, a feed-forward layer and a self-attention layer. The latter allows the network to capture long…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models excel in robotic manipulation but suffer from significant inference latency due to processing dense visual tokens. Existing token reduction methods predominantly rely on attention magnitude as a static…