English
Related papers

Related papers: Provably Learning Attention with Queries

200 papers

The training and generalization dynamics of the Transformer's core mechanism, namely the Attention mechanism, remain under-explored. Besides, existing analyses primarily focus on single-head attention. Inspired by the demonstrated benefits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Puneesh Deora , Rouzbeh Ghaderi , Hossein Taheri , Christos Thrampoulidis

Transformer architecture has become ubiquitous in the natural language processing field. To interpret the Transformer-based models, their attention patterns have been extensively analyzed. However, the Transformer architecture is not only…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Goro Kobayashi , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Sho Yokoi , Kentaro Inui

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

Deep learning models have been widely applied in various aspects of daily life. Many variant models based on deep learning structures have achieved even better performances. Attention-based architectures have become almost ubiquitous in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Zhiying Fang , Yidong Ouyang , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Guang Cheng

The transformer architecture is widely used in machine learning models and consists of two alternating sublayers: attention heads and MLPs. We prove that an MLP neuron can be implemented by a masked attention head with internal dimension 1…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-18 Robert Huben , Valerie Morris

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

The original softmax-based attention mechanism (regular attention) in the extremely successful Transformer architecture computes attention between $N$ tokens, each embedded in a $D$-dimensional head, with a time complexity of $O(N^2D)$.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Armin Gerami , Ramani Duraiswami

Attention is a key component of the now ubiquitous pre-trained language models. By learning to focus on relevant pieces of information, these Transformer-based architectures have proven capable of tackling several tasks at once and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Vincent Micheli , Quentin Heinrich , François Fleuret , Wacim Belblidia

Attention layers are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) and are beginning to influence computer vision architectures. Training very large transformer models allowed significant improvement in both fields, but once trained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Jean-Baptiste Cordonnier , Andreas Loukas , Martin Jaggi

Transformers are built upon multi-head scaled dot-product attention and positional encoding, which aim to learn the feature representations and token dependencies. In this work, we focus on enhancing the distinctive representation by…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Litao Yu , Jian Zhang

To improve the robustness of transformer neural networks used for temporal-dynamics prediction of chaotic systems, we propose a novel attention mechanism called easy attention which we demonstrate in time-series reconstruction and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Marcial Sanchis-Agudo , Yuning Wang , Roger Arnau , Luca Guastoni , Jasmin Lim , Karthik Duraisamy , Ricardo Vinuesa

There is a growing interest in the ability of neural networks to execute algorithmic tasks (e.g., arithmetic, summary statistics, and sorting). The goal of this work is to better understand the role of attention in Transformers for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Artur Back de Luca , George Giapitzakis , Shenghao Yang , Petar Veličković , Kimon Fountoulakis

Phase transitions mark qualitative reorganizations of collective behavior, yet identifying their boundaries remains challenging whenever analytic solutions are absent and conventional simulations fail. Here we introduce learnability as a…

Materials Science · Physics 2025-10-10 Şener Özönder

Recent advancements in attention mechanisms have replaced recurrent neural networks and its variants for machine translation tasks. Transformer using attention mechanism solely achieved state-of-the-art results in sequence modeling. Neural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Prakhar Thapak , Prodip Hore

Trained attention layers exhibit striking and reproducible spectral structure of the weights, including low-rank collapse, bulk deformation, and isolated spectral outliers, yet the origin of these phenomena and their implications for…

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Lorenzo Basile , Valentino Maiorca , Diego Doimo , Francesco Locatello , Alberto Cazzaniga

The Transformer architecture model, based on self-attention and multi-head attention, has achieved remarkable success in offline end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, self-attention and multi-head attention cannot be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-03 Chendong Zhao , Jianzong Wang , Wen qi Wei , Xiaoyang Qu , Haoqian Wang , Jing Xiao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Hasi Hays

Attention-based models, such as Transformer, excel across various tasks but lack a comprehensive theoretical understanding, especially regarding token-wise sparsity and internal linear representations. To address this gap, we introduce the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-27 Pierre Marion , Raphaël Berthier , Gérard Biau , Claire Boyer

We describe an efficient hierarchical method to compute attention in the Transformer architecture. The proposed attention mechanism exploits a matrix structure similar to the Hierarchical Matrix (H-Matrix) developed by the numerical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Zhenhai Zhu , Radu Soricut