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Transformers have demonstrated great success in numerous domains including natural language processing and bioinformatics. This success stems from the use of the attention mechanism by these models in order to represent and propagate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Nathaniel Tomczak , Sanmukh Kuppannagari

In this note, we show that the relative entropy of an empirical distribution of $n$ samples drawn from a set of size $k$ with respect to the true underlying distribution is exponentially concentrated around its expectation, with central…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-03-03 Rohit Agrawal

Attention is the critical component of a transformer. Yet the quadratic computational complexity of vanilla full attention in the input size and the inability of its linear attention variant to focus have been challenges for computer vision…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Nhat Thanh Tran , Fanghui Xue , Shuai Zhang , Jiancheng Lyu , Yunling Zheng , Yingyong Qi , Jack Xin

Transformer architectures have led to remarkable progress in many state-of-art applications. However, despite their successes, modern transformers rely on the self-attention mechanism, whose time- and space-complexity is quadratic in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Feyza Duman Keles , Pruthuvi Mahesakya Wijewardena , Chinmay Hegde

We study the behavior of the posterior distribution in high-dimensional Bayesian Gaussian linear regression models having $p\gg n$, with $p$ the number of predictors and $n$ the sample size. Our focus is on obtaining quantitative finite…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2014-01-06 Nate Strawn , Artin Armagan , Rayan Saab , Lawrence Carin , David Dunson

Over recent years, the Transformer has become a fundamental building block for sequence modeling architectures. Yet at its core is the use of self-attention, whose memory and computational cost grow quadratically with the sequence length…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Qiuhao Zeng , Jerry Huang , Peng Lu , Gezheng Xu , Boxing Chen , Charles Ling , Boyu Wang

The quadratic complexity of attention remains the central bottleneck in long-context inference for large language models. Prior acceleration methods either sparsify the attention map with structured patterns or permanently evict tokens at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Dongwon Jo , Beomseok Kang , Jiwon Song , Jae-Joon Kim

To date, most state-of-the-art sequence modeling architectures use attention to build generative models for language based tasks. Some of these models use all the available sequence tokens to generate an attention distribution which results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Vasileios Lioutas , Yuhong Guo

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

Attention mechanisms in neural networks have proved useful for problems in which the input and output do not have fixed dimension. Often there exist features that are locally translation invariant and would be valuable for directing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-26 Miltiadis Allamanis , Hao Peng , Charles Sutton

Self-attention and masked self-attention are at the heart of Transformers' outstanding success. Still, our mathematical understanding of attention, in particular of its Lipschitz properties - which are key when it comes to analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-05 Valérie Castin , Pierre Ablin , Gabriel Peyré

We study problem-dependent rates, i.e., generalization errors that scale near-optimally with the variance, the effective loss, or the gradient norms evaluated at the "best hypothesis." We introduce a principled framework dubbed "uniform…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-25 Yunbei Xu , Assaf Zeevi

Prior work on input-token importance in auto-regressive transformers has relied on Softmax-normalized attention weights, which obscure the richer structure of pre-Softmax query-key logits. We introduce RCStat, a statistical framework that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Debabrata Mahapatra , Shubham Agarwal , Apoorv Saxena , Subrata Mitra

We propose the first method to show theoretical limitations for one-layer softmax transformers with arbitrarily many precision bits (even infinite). We establish those limitations for three tasks that require advanced reasoning. The first…

We establish the sharpness of the percolation phase transition for a class of infinite-range weighted random connection models. The vertex set is given by a marked Poisson point process on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with intensity $\lambda>0$, where…

Probability · Mathematics 2025-12-29 Alejandro Caicedo , Leonid Kolesnikov

Two-timescale Stochastic Approximation (SA) algorithms are widely used in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Their iterates have two parts that are updated using distinct stepsizes. In this work, we develop a novel recipe for their finite sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-06 Gal Dalal , Balazs Szorenyi , Gugan Thoppe , Shie Mannor

Score-based diffusion models have demonstrated outstanding empirical performance in machine learning and artificial intelligence, particularly in generating high-quality new samples from complex probability distributions. Improving the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-30 Yuchen Jiao , Gen Li

In this paper we study the concentration properties for the eigenvalues of kernel matrices, which are central objects in a wide range of kernel methods and, more recently, in network analysis. We present a set of concentration inequalities…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-27 Ernesto Araya Valdivia

In the Transformer model, "self-attention" combines information from attended embeddings into the representation of the focal embedding in the next layer. Thus, across layers of the Transformer, information originating from different tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Samira Abnar , Willem Zuidema

The most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) models today are Transformers employing self-attention. In its standard form, self-attention incurs costs that increase with context length, driving demand for storage, compute, and energy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Franz A. Heinsen , Leo Kozachkov