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Standard transformer attention computes pairwise token similarity but treats all tokens as equally salient and all positions as equally local, regardless of the informational structure of the input. We identify two complementary inductive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Athanasios Zeris

We argue that neither transformers nor sub-quadratic architectures are well suited to training at long sequence lengths: the cost of processing the context is too expensive in the former, too inexpensive in the latter. Approaches such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Carles Gelada , Jacob Buckman , Sean Zhang , Txus Bach

In Transformer-based architectures, the attention mechanism is inherently permutation-invariant with respect to the input sequence's tokens. To impose sequential order, token positions are typically encoded using a scheme with either fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Giorgio Angelotti

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Jesse Vig

Processing spatial data is a key component in many learning tasks for autonomous driving such as motion forecasting, multi-agent simulation, and planning. Prior works have demonstrated the value in using SE(2) invariant network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-25 Ethan Pronovost , Neha Boloor , Peter Schleede , Noureldin Hendy , Andres Morales , Nicholas Roy

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Laziz U. Abdullaev , Maksim Tkachenko , Tan M. Nguyen

Attention mechanisms represent a fundamental paradigm shift in neural network architectures, enabling models to selectively focus on relevant portions of input sequences through learned weighting functions. This monograph provides a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Hasi Hays

The attention mechanism in its standard implementation contains extraneous rotational degrees of freedom that are carried through computation but do not affect model activations or outputs. We introduce a simple symmetry-breaking protocol…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Eva Silverstein , Daniel Kunin , Vasudev Shyam

Transformers often appear to perform Bayesian reasoning in context, but verifying this rigorously has been impossible: natural data lack analytic posteriors, and large models conflate reasoning with memorization. We address this by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Naman Agarwal , Siddhartha R. Dalal , Vishal Misra

What structural inductive bias helps transformers reason over knowledge graphs? Through controlled ablations of a minimal transformer modification with four independently removable components (sparse adjacency masking, edge-type biases,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jonas Petersen , Camilla Mazzoleni , Gian-Alessandro Lombardi , Federico Martelli , Riccardo Maggioni

Transformers have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, yet their performance on compositional problems remains a subject of debate. In this study, we investigate the internal mechanisms underlying Transformers'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Zhongwang Zhang , Pengxiao Lin , Zhiwei Wang , Yaoyu Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

Self-attention in Transformers relies on globally normalized softmax weights, causing all tokens to compete for influence at every layer. When composed across depth, this interaction pattern induces strong synchronization dynamics that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingkun Liu , Yisong Yue , Max Welling , Yue Song

Recent studies on interpretability of attention distributions have led to notions of faithful and plausible explanations for a model's predictions. Attention distributions can be considered a faithful explanation if a higher attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-30 Akash Kumar Mohankumar , Preksha Nema , Sharan Narasimhan , Mitesh M. Khapra , Balaji Vasan Srinivasan , Balaraman Ravindran

When training transformers on graph-structured data, incorporating information about the underlying topology is crucial for good performance. Topological masking, a type of relative position encoding, achieves this by upweighting or…

In recent years, Transformer-based architectures have become the dominant method for Computer Vision applications. While Transformers are explainable and scale well with dataset size, they lack the inductive biases of Convolutional Neural…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Adithya Giri

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

The transformer architecture is central to the success of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), in part due to its surprising ability to perform a wide range of tasks - including mathematical reasoning, memorization, and retrieval - using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yihe Dong , Lorenzo Noci , Mikhail Khodak , Mufan Li

Control laws for selective transfer of information encoded in excitations of a quantum network, based on shaping the energy landscape using time-invariant, spatially-varying bias fields, can be successfully designed using numerical…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2018-01-03 Edmond A. Jonckheere , Sophie G. Schirmer , Frank C. Langbein

In pursuit of faster computation, Efficient Transformers demonstrate an impressive variety of approaches -- models attaining sub-quadratic attention complexity can utilize a notion of sparsity or a low-rank approximation of inputs to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-09 Uladzislau Yorsh , Alexander Kovalenko

Designing a single neural network architecture that performs competitively across a range of molecule property prediction tasks remains largely an open challenge, and its solution may unlock a widespread use of deep learning in the drug…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-10 Łukasz Maziarka , Tomasz Danel , Sławomir Mucha , Krzysztof Rataj , Jacek Tabor , Stanisław Jastrzębski