English
Related papers

Related papers: Attention Is Not What You Need

200 papers

Linear attention mechanisms have emerged as efficient alternatives to full self-attention in Graph Transformers, offering linear time complexity. However, existing linear attention models often suffer from a significant drop in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhaolin Hu , Kun Li , Hehe Fan , Yi Yang

Effective representation learning from text has been an active area of research in the fields of NLP and text mining. Attention mechanisms have been at the forefront in order to learn contextual sentence representations. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Sneha Mehta , Huzefa Rangwala , Naren Ramakrishnan

As the demand for processing extended textual data grows, the ability to handle long-range dependencies and maintain computational efficiency is more critical than ever. One of the key issues for long-sequence modeling using attention-based…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Aosong Feng , Rex Ying , Leandros Tassiulas

In this paper, I introduce the retrieval problem, a simple yet common reasoning task that can be solved only by transformers with a minimum number of layers, which grows logarithmically with the input size. I empirically show that large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Tiberiu Musat

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Edouard Grave , Guillaume Lample , Herve Jegou , Armand Joulin

Learning representations on large-sized graphs is a long-standing challenge due to the inter-dependence nature involved in massive data points. Transformers, as an emerging class of foundation encoders for graph-structured data, have shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Qitian Wu , Wentao Zhao , Chenxiao Yang , Hengrui Zhang , Fan Nie , Haitian Jiang , Yatao Bian , Junchi Yan

We propose a multi-explanation graph attention network (MEGAN). Unlike existing graph explainability methods, our network can produce node and edge attributional explanations along multiple channels, the number of which is independent of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Jonas Teufel , Luca Torresi , Patrick Reiser , Pascal Friederich

The aim of this paper is to provide a mathematical analysis of transformer architectures using a self-attention mechanism with layer normalization. In particular, observed patterns in such architectures resembling either clusters or uniform…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2025-04-29 Martin Burger , Samira Kabri , Yury Korolev , Tim Roith , Lukas Weigand

Self-attention in Transformers is typically implemented as $\mathrm{softmax}(QK^\top/\sqrt{d})V$, where $Q=XW_Q$, $K=XW_K$, and $V=XW_V$ are learned linear projections of the input $X$. We ask whether these learned projections are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Debarshi Kundu , Archisman Ghosh , Swaroop Ghosh , Vasant Honavar

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Javier Ferrando , Marta R. Costa-jussà

The Transformer, with its scaled dot-product attention mechanism, has become a foundational architecture in modern AI. However, this mechanism is computationally intensive and incurs substantial energy costs. We propose a new Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-07 Xin Gao , Xingming Xu , Shirin Amiraslani , Hong Xu

In this work we propose an energy functional along the lines of Modern Hopfield Networks (MNH), the stationary points of which correspond to the attention due to Vaswani et al. [12], thus unifying both frameworks. The minima of this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-16 Ahmed Farooq

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

The Transformer architecture has revolutionized the field of sequence modeling and underpins the recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs). However, a comprehensive mathematical theory that explains its structure and operations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Xue-Cheng Tai , Hao Liu , Lingfeng Li , Raymond H. Chan

Attention mechanisms have become a standard tool for sequence modeling tasks, in particular by stacking self-attention layers over the entire input sequence as in the Transformer architecture. In this work we introduce a novel attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Da Ju , Stephen Roller , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , Jason Weston

Attending to what is relevant is fundamental to both the mammalian brain and modern machine learning models such as Transformers. Yet, determining relevance remains a core challenge, traditionally offloaded to learning algorithms like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Ahsan Adeel

Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Hongyu Ren , Hanjun Dai , Zihang Dai , Mengjiao Yang , Jure Leskovec , Dale Schuurmans , Bo Dai

Attention mechanisms have become a core component of deep learning models, with Channel Attention and Spatial Attention being the two most representative architectures. Current research on their fusion strategies primarily bifurcates into…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Zhongming Liu , Bingbing Jiang

The dot product self-attention is known to be central and indispensable to state-of-the-art Transformer models. But is it really required? This paper investigates the true importance and contribution of the dot product-based self-attention…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Yi Tay , Dara Bahri , Donald Metzler , Da-Cheng Juan , Zhe Zhao , Che Zheng

Recently, self-attention models such as Transformers have given competitive results compared to recurrent neural network systems in speech recognition. The key factor for the outstanding performance of self-attention models is their ability…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-05-29 Shucong Zhang , Erfan Loweimi , Peter Bell , Steve Renals