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The success of Transformer-based Language Models (LMs) stems from their attention mechanism. While this mechanism has been extensively studied in explainability research, particularly through the attention values obtained during the forward…
Attention sinks -- tokens that receive disproportionate attention mass -- are assumed to be functionally important in autoregressive language models, but their role in diffusion transformers remains unclear. We present a causal analysis in…
Standard transformers entangle all computation in a single residual stream, obscuring which components perform which functions. We introduce the Dual-Stream Transformer, which decomposes the residual stream into two functionally distinct…
An attention matrix of a transformer self-attention sublayer can provably be decomposed into two components and only one of them (effective attention) contributes to the model output. This leads us to ask whether visualizing effective…
Many empirical studies have provided evidence for the emergence of algorithmic mechanisms (abilities) in the learning of language models, that lead to qualitative improvements of the model capabilities. Yet, a theoretical characterization…
Masked diffusion models (MDMs), which leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process, are narrowing the performance gap with autoregressive models (ARMs). However, their internal attention mechanisms remain under-explored. This…
In humans, Attention is a core property of all perceptual and cognitive operations. Given our limited ability to process competing sources, attention mechanisms select, modulate, and focus on the information most relevant to behavior. For…
Attention-based neural networks, such as Transformers, have become ubiquitous in numerous applications, including computer vision, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. In all kinds of attention networks, the attention maps…
The Transformer model architecture has become one of the most widely used in deep learning and the attention mechanism is at its core. The standard attention formulation uses a softmax operation applied to a scaled dot product between query…
Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success across language, vision, and multimodal tasks, and there is growing demand for them to address in-context compositional learning tasks. In these tasks, models solve the target…
The self-attention mechanism, a cornerstone of Transformer-based state-of-the-art deep learning architectures, is largely heuristic-driven and fundamentally challenging to interpret. Establishing a robust theoretical foundation to explain…
Modern causal language models stack many attention blocks to improve performance, but not all blocks are necessary for every task. We propose Hopscotch, a simple yet effective method that identifies and skips attention blocks with least…
This work proposes an extensive analysis of the Transformer architecture in the Neural Machine Translation (NMT) setting. Focusing on the encoder-decoder attention mechanism, we prove that attention weights systematically make alignment…
Transformers face quadratic complexity and memory issues with long sequences, prompting the adoption of linear attention mechanisms using fixed-size hidden states. However, linear models often suffer from limited recall performance, leading…
Transformer architectures are the backbone of the modern AI revolution. However, they are based on simply stacking the same blocks in dozens of layers and processing information sequentially from one block to another. In this paper, we…
Attention is a powerful and ubiquitous mechanism for allowing neural models to focus on particular salient pieces of information by taking their weighted average when making predictions. In particular, multi-headed attention is a driving…
Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language…
Transformer-based deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance across numerous language and vision tasks. While the self-attention mechanism, a core component of transformers, has proven capable of handling complex data…
Attention mechanism has been extensively integrated within mainstream neural network architectures, such as Transformers and graph attention networks. Yet, its underlying working principles remain somewhat elusive. What is its essence? Are…
The success of the self-attention mechanism in classical machine learning models has inspired the development of quantum analogs aimed at reducing computational overhead. Self-attention integrates learnable query and key matrices to…