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Since transformer was firstly published in 2017, several works have been proposed to optimize it. However, the major structure of transformer remains unchanged, ignoring one of its main intrinsic limitations, which is the same static value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Xiaowei Wang

The versatility of self-attention mechanism earned transformers great success in almost all data modalities, with limitations on the quadratic complexity and difficulty of training. Efficient transformers, on the other hand, often rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Minh Lenhat , Viet Anh Nguyen , Khoa Nguyen , Duong Duc Hieu , Dao Huu Hung , Truong Son Hy

We present a theoretical analysis of the performance of transformer with softmax attention in in-context learning with linear regression tasks. While the existing literature predominantly focuses on the convergence of transformers with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Yingqian Cui , Jie Ren , Pengfei He , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Wayner Barrios , SouYoung Jin

Self-attention is an attention mechanism that learns a representation by relating different positions in the sequence. The transformer, which is a sequence model solely based on self-attention, and its variants achieved state-of-the-art…

Sound · Computer Science 2019-06-13 Minz Won , Sanghyuk Chun , Xavier Serra

Transformer models are revolutionizing machine learning, but their inner workings remain mysterious. In this work, we present a new visualization technique designed to help researchers understand the self-attention mechanism in transformers…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Catherine Yeh , Yida Chen , Aoyu Wu , Cynthia Chen , Fernanda Viégas , Martin Wattenberg

Understanding the training dynamics of transformers is important to explain the impressive capabilities behind large language models. In this work, we study the dynamics of training a shallow transformer on a task of recognizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Hongru Yang , Bhavya Kailkhura , Zhangyang Wang , Yingbin Liang

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

The self-attention mechanism, now central to deep learning architectures such as Transformers, is a modern instance of a more general computational principle: learning and using pairwise affinity matrices to control how information flows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Giorgio Roffo

The self-attention mechanism, at the heart of the Transformer model, is able to effectively model pairwise interactions between tokens. However, numerous recent works have shown that it is unable to perform basic tasks involving detecting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sayak Chakrabarti , Toniann Pitassi , Josh Alman

The success of self-attention lies in its ability to capture long-range dependencies and enhance context understanding, but it is limited by its computational complexity and challenges in handling sequential data with inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Md Kowsher , Nusrat Jahan Prottasha , Chun-Nam Yu , Ozlem Ozmen Garibay , Niloofar Yousefi

Convolution and self-attention are two powerful techniques for representation learning, and they are usually considered as two peer approaches that are distinct from each other. In this paper, we show that there exists a strong underlying…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-03-15 Xuran Pan , Chunjiang Ge , Rui Lu , Shiji Song , Guanfu Chen , Zeyi Huang , Gao Huang

Transformers have recently revolutionized many domains in modern machine learning and one salient discovery is their remarkable in-context learning capability, where models can solve an unseen task by utilizing task-specific prompts without…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yu Huang , Yuan Cheng , Yingbin Liang

Transformers and their attention mechanism have been revolutionary in the field of Machine Learning. While originally proposed for the language data, they quickly found their way to the image, video, graph, etc. data modalities with various…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Saeed Amizadeh , Sara Abdali , Yinheng Li , Kazuhito Koishida

Although transformer-based models have shown exceptional empirical performance, the fundamental principles governing their training dynamics are inadequately characterized beyond configuration-specific studies. Inspired by empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Zheng-An Chen , Tao Luo

This thesis examines self-attention training through the lens of Optimal Transport (OT) and develops an OT-based alternative for tabular classification. The study tracks intermediate projections of the self-attention layer during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Alessandro Quadrio , Antonio Candelieri

Transformer-based architectures achieve state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of tasks in natural language processing, computer vision, and speech processing. However, their immense capacity often leads to overfitting, especially…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Mirza Samad Ahmed Baig , Syeda Anshrah Gillani , Abdul Akbar Khan , Shahid Munir Shah , Muhammad Omer Khan

The self-attention mechanism has been a key factor in the advancement of vision Transformers. However, its quadratic complexity imposes a heavy computational burden in high-resolution scenarios, restricting the practical application.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Dongchen Han , Tianyu Li , Ziyi Wang , Gao Huang

We develop a mathematical framework that interprets Transformer attention as an interacting particle system and studies its continuum (mean-field) limits. By idealizing attention on the sphere, we connect Transformer dynamics to Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Philippe Rigollet

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian