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Related papers: The Bayesian Geometry of Transformer Attention

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Attention-based neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results on a wide range of tasks. Most such models use deterministic attention while stochastic attention is less explored due to the optimization difficulties or complicated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Shujian Zhang , Xinjie Fan , Bo Chen , Mingyuan Zhou

Bayesian models are a powerful tool for studying complex data, allowing the analyst to encode rich hierarchical dependencies and leverage prior information. Most importantly, they facilitate a complete characterization of uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-25 Steven Winter , Trevor Campbell , Lizhen Lin , Sanvesh Srivastava , David B. Dunson

Accurate and physically consistent modeling of Earth system dynamics requires machine-learning architectures that operate directly on continuous geophysical fields and preserve their underlying geometric structure. Here we introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Maximilian Witte , Johannes Meuer , Étienne Plésiat , Christopher Kadow

The Bayesian approach to machine learning amounts to computing posterior distributions of random variables from a probabilistic model of how the variables are related (that is, a prior distribution) and a set of observations of variables.…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-07-01 Johannes Borgström , Andrew D Gordon , Michael Greenberg , James Margetson , Jurgen Van Gael

Transformers have achieved remarkable success in sequence modeling and beyond but suffer from quadratic computational and memory complexities with respect to the length of the input sequence. Leveraging techniques include sparse and linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Tan Nguyen , Richard G. Baraniuk , Robert M. Kirby , Stanley J. Osher , Bao Wang

Transformers have emerged as a powerful neural network architecture capable of tackling a wide range of learning tasks. In this work, we provide a theoretical analysis of their ability to automatically extract structure from data in an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-29 Rodrigo Maulen-Soto , Pierre Marion , Claire Boyer

This research endeavors to offer insights into unlocking the further potential of transformer-based architectures. One of the primary motivations is to offer a geometric interpretation for the attention mechanism in transformers. In our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhongping Ji

The transformer architecture has become the foundation of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), yet its theoretical properties are still not well understood. As with classic neural networks, a common approach to improve these models is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Álvaro Rodríguez Abella , João Pedro Silvestre , Paulo Tabuada

Bayesian inference promises a framework for principled uncertainty quantification of neural network predictions. Barriers to adoption include the difficulty of fully characterizing posterior distributions on network parameters and the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-22 Katharine Fisher , Youssef Marzouk

The Transformer is a highly successful deep learning model that has revolutionised the world of artificial neural networks, first in natural language processing and later in computer vision. This model is based on the attention mechanism…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Riccardo Ughi , Eugenio Lomurno , Matteo Matteucci

Transformer is a ubiquitous model for natural language processing and has attracted wide attentions in computer vision. The attention maps are indispensable for a transformer model to encode the dependencies among input tokens. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Yujing Wang , Yaming Yang , Jiangang Bai , Mingliang Zhang , Jing Bai , Jing Yu , Ce Zhang , Gao Huang , Yunhai Tong

Transformer architectures are typically described in algorithmic and statistical terms, leaving their internal mechanics without a familiar structural language for researchers trained in physical theories. To bridge this gap, we develop a…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-03-18 Po-Hao Chang

Transformer architectures have revolutionized artificial intelligence (AI) through their attention mechanisms, yet the computational principles underlying their success remain opaque. We present a novel theoretical framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Mu Qiao

Understanding the fundamental mechanism behind the success of transformer networks is still an open problem in the deep learning literature. Although their remarkable performance has been mostly attributed to the self-attention mechanism,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Tolga Ergen , Behnam Neyshabur , Harsh Mehta

Transformers excel through content-addressable retrieval and the ability to exploit contexts of, in principle, unbounded length. We recast associative memory at the level of probability measures, treating a context as a distribution over…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-03 Ryotaro Kawata , Taiji Suzuki

Search is an ability foundational in many important tasks, and recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) struggle to perform search robustly. It is unknown whether this inability is due to a lack of data, insufficient…

Neural networks trained with standard objectives exhibit behaviors characteristic of probabilistic inference: soft clustering, prototype specialization, and Bayesian uncertainty tracking. These phenomena appear across architectures -- in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alan Oursland

Vision Transformers are very popular nowadays due to their state-of-the-art performance in several computer vision tasks, such as image classification and action recognition. Although their performance has been greatly enhanced through…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Dimitrios Konstantinidis , Ilias Papastratis , Kosmas Dimitropoulos , Petros Daras

Bayesian inference allows machine learning models to express uncertainty. Current machine learning models use only a single learnable parameter combination when making predictions, and as a result are highly overconfident when their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Andrew Wood , Moshik Hershcovitch , Daniel Waddington , Sarel Cohen , Peter Chin

While attention has been empirically shown to improve model performance, it lacks a rigorous mathematical justification. This short paper establishes a novel connection between attention mechanisms and multinomial regression. Specifically,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jonas A. Actor , Anthony Gruber , Eric C. Cyr