Related papers: Attention Needs to Focus: A Unified Perspective on…

Soft attention in Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) is susceptible to incorporating irrelevant information from the context into its latent representations, which adversely affects next token generations. To help rectify these…

Large vision-and-language models (LVLMs) have traditionally integrated visual and textual tokens by concatenating them into a single homogeneous input for large language models (LLMs), thereby maximally preserving the pre-trained language…

Transformers are mostly relying on softmax attention, which introduces quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length and remains a major bottleneck for efficient inference. Prior work on linear or hybrid attention typically replaces…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable success in multi-modal reasoning, but their inference time efficiency remains a significant challenge due to the memory overhead during decoding, especially when the query and…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) incur significant computational cost from processing numerous vision tokens through all LLM layers. Prior pruning methods operate either before the LLM, limiting generality due to diverse…

Transformers have had tremendous impact for several sequence related tasks, largely due to their ability to retrieve from any part of the sequence via softmax based dot-product attention. This mechanism plays a crucial role in Transformer's…

Attention models are typically learned by optimizing one of three standard loss functions that are variously called -- soft attention, hard attention, and latent variable marginal likelihood (LVML) attention. All three paradigms are…

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…

Transformer-based models have emerged as a leading architecture for natural language processing, natural language generation, and image generation tasks. A fundamental element of the transformer architecture is self-attention, which allows…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit two striking and ostensibly unrelated behaviours: in-context learning (ICL) and repetitive generation. In both, the model behaves as though it had summarised the context into a population-level statistic…

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Sparse attention methods exploit the inherent sparsity in attention to speed up the prefilling phase of long-context inference, mitigating the quadratic complexity of full attention computation. While existing sparse attention methods rely…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. These capabilities stem primarily from the self-attention mechanism, which enables modeling of long-range…

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their impressive capabilities, often fail to accurately repeat a single word when prompted to, and instead output unrelated text. This unexplained failure mode represents a vulnerability, allowing even…

Large Language Model (LLM) based text-to-speech (TTS) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling large speech datasets and generating natural speech for new speakers. However, LLM-based TTS models are not robust as the…

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…

When humans describe a visual scene, they do not process the entire image uniformly; instead, they selectively fixate on regions relevant to their intended description. In contrast, current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) attend to…

Attention is the cornerstone of modern Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet its quadratic complexity hinders efficiency and scalability, especially for long-context processing. A promising approach is to leverage sparsity in attention.…

The strong capabilities of recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have made them highly effective for zero-shot re-ranking task. Attention-based re-ranking methods, which derive relevance scores directly from attention weights, offer an…

The quadratic complexity of standard attention mechanisms poses a significant scalability bottleneck for large language models (LLMs) in long-context scenarios. While hybrid attention strategies that combine sparse and full attention within…